India-born former Google executive Nikesh Arora has bought shares valued at $482 million (Rs.3,148 crore) of Japanese multinational SoftBank Group Corporation in which he is director, president and chief operating officer.
In a regulatory filing to the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Wednesday, SoftBank said its board members had approved Arora investing in the group in his personal capacity. ”The transaction, made two weeks after results were announced, is compliant with Japanese and US financial market regulations,” the group said in a statement later.
A graduate from IIT-Varanasi, who went on to do MBA in an American university, Arora left Google after a decade to join SoftBank in July 2014, with a whopping salary of $135 million, making him the world’s third highest paid honcho. ”My past year with the SoftBank group has been very rewarding. As a measure of commitment, I have decided to take a personal bet on the group and ensure an alignment of vision, with its founder, chairman and chief executive Masayoshi Son,” Arora said in the statement.
Observing that he had taken an enormous risk with such a large transaction, Arora said he was, however, confident of the group’s future and its long-term objectives. Expecting Arora to succeed him at an appropriate time, Masayoshi said he was delighted on his successor’s decision to double down on his partnership with him. ”As Arora’s vision is aligned with me, we plan to work together for many years to make the group sustainable success for decades,” Masayoshi said.
Masayoshi also said Arora was a great business leader and a good person at heart. Incidentally, the Japanese telecom and internet major has been a major investor in India’s e-commerce enterprises like Snapdeal, in which it has invested with Alibaba and Foxconn an unspecified amount on Tuesday and $627 million in its eighth round of funding in October 2014.