Bloomberg)—Singapore may have just added a new tech billionaire,
but it had to lure him from Japan first.
Taizo Son, who built his fortune on hit smartphone game Puzzle
& Dragons, has relocated to the city-state from Tokyo and plans
to invest $100 million in Southeast Asia within five years. The
younger brother of SoftBank Group Corp.’s founder said in Singapore
on Monday he’d become frustrated by regulation in Japan as well as
the country’s education system.
“I tried very hard by lobbying the Japanese government: ‘Why
don’t we have a regulatory sandbox to bring some innovative
ideas?,”’ Son told the event arranged by the private bank of
DBS Group Holdings Ltd. “But the country’s
too big and very slow to move. But here, even the government,
regulators are innovation-minded.”
Singapore’s high rate of internet use and a reliance on online
data-processing has helped propel Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s
Smart Nation initiative since it was launched in 2014. The program
has seen the government, agencies and companies look to use
technology to change how things are done, from self-driving buses
and traffic management to public transport fares that are charged
automatically.
With little crime, low personal tax rates and no capital gains
tax, the country has already drawn other billionaires, including
Eduardo Saverin, a co-founder of Facebook Inc.
Taizo Son founded gamemaker GungHo Online Entertainment Inc. and
is now chief executive officer of Mistletoe, a combination of
early-stage venture firm, incubator and entrepreneur-in-residence
program. His brother Masayoshi Son is chairman of SoftBank and is
Japan’s second-richest man with a net worth of $12.9 billion,
according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
After moving to the wealthy enclave of Sentosa, Taizo Son
expects to receive his permanent residency within three months.
He was partly motivated by his three-year-old son after losing
confidence in Japan’s education system, which he said has failed to
adapt from the approach used to build the company into a postwar
industrial giant.
The Japanese system is “extremely terrible” at creating
entrepreneurs and Son said he intends to open a school in Singapore
after recently opening a new school near Tokyo that encourages
children to learn without teachers.
Among his existing investments in the region is games and
e-commerce operator Garena, the most valuable startup in Southeast
Asia.
At the event, Son laid out his vision for a futuristic city
where large vehicles go underground, commuting is done on personal
mobility devices and people can shower with water purification
systems the size of a suitcase.
“I’m getting an inspiration from Venice because inside Venice
there is no car,” he said. He added an aspiration to redesign
cities away from the industrialized, car-centric model of the 20th
century to one that is more “human-centric.”