Days after Softbank billionaire Masayoshi Son met with Donald Trump to discuss a $100 million investment fund that would funnel half of itself into American companies, Apple may be getting in on the action.
Apple has reportedly discussed putting some of its own money in what looks set to be history’s biggest, technology-investment fund.
Apple has talked to Softbank about investing up to $1 billion in the fund, according to reports in Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, which cites people familiar with the matter, and who cautioned that any investment from Apple had yet to be finalized.
Such a move would bring Apple’s cash, estimated to be worth some $200 billion and located mostly outside of the United States, into one of the world’s biggest investment funds.
It also marks another change in Apple’s investment strategy, one where Apple potentially outsources a large chunk of its cash with a middle man.
Apple historically has invested its money in acquiring young, often unknown startups in order to boost its research and development efforts. Last year, for instance, it bought Finnish startup Indoor.io to help it better map large, indoor spaces, and it has also picked up a number of machine-learning companies including Turi, for $200 million in August.
A massive investment in Softbank’s so-called Vision Fund, however, suggests Apple is moving further towards a tamer form of arms-length investing. Rather than invest in companies that it can integrate into its own products, it wants to profit from technology firms that look set to be successful in their own right. A prime example of this was in May, when Apple invested $1 billion in popular Chinese tax app Didi Chuxing.
While Softbank is seeding the London-headquartered Vision fund with at least $25 billion of its own money, it’s not the fund’s biggest investor; that distinction goes to the Saudi Arabian government, whose sovereign wealth fund will be putting in a reported $45 billion. A sovereign wealth fund for the government of Abu Dhabi is also considering a large investment in the fund, according to the WSJ.
Apple’s involvement in the fund would be another example of the company’s longstanding relationship with Softbank. Though the latter is looking more and more like an investment vehicle for billionaire Son, it’s core business is as Japan’s leading telecommunications company, and it was the first to distribute the iPhone in 2008.
Softbank also has ties to key parts of Apple’s supply chain. Son is said to be close to the head of Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology group, which assembles the iPhone. Earlier this year, Softbank also spent $32 billion buying British mobile-chip designer ARM, whose chip blueprints are found inside the iPhone.
Apple CEO Tim Cook responds to a question during a news conference at IBM Watson headquarters, in... [+]
