Corporate venturers Rajeev Misra and Marcelo Claure are leaving Japan-headquartered telecommunications and internet group SoftBank’s board of directors, it announced yesterday.
Misra, head of the company’s Vision Fund, and Claure, the chief operating officer of SoftBank who also oversees its $5bn Latin America fund, will be joined by SoftBank chief strategy officer Katsunori Sago and Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, a representative of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
SoftBank’s core business has traditionally been in telecoms, but it has increasingly put more resources into its corporate venturing activities in recent years, putting some $33bn into the $98.6bn Vision Fund alongside $45bn from PIF.
The moves are intended to increase the proportion of external directors on the board and follows the appointment of independent directors Lip-Bu Tan and Yuko Kawamoto in June this year. They reduce the number of board members from 13 to nine.
SoftBank announced the changes on the same day as financial results indicating that it had increased net income to about $18bn for the six months to the end of September this year, while the paper value of its Vision Fund investments have also risen significantly.
