Following Donald Trump’s visit to Riyadh, the world’s largest private equity fund announced that it had raised over $93 billion to invest in different technology sectors.
Softbank Vision Fund (OTCMKTS:SFTBF) said in a statement: “The next stage of the Information Revolution is under way, and building the businesses that will make this possible will require unprecedented large-scale, long-term investment,”
The announcement comes following Donald Trump’s first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia, where tens of billions of dollars worth of business deals were signed between Saudi Arabian and companies in the United States.
Trump has taken full credit of the deal. After his meeting in December with the chairman of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, Son pledged $50 billion of investment to the United States that would then lead to an estimated 50,000 jobs. Trump said this was a direct result of his election win.
This comes at an important time for Saudi as their economy has taken a hit from the low oil prices. The access to foreign technology is a chance for the state to broaden and expand into new industries.
The fund’s investors will also include Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology (TPE:2354) and Japan’s Sharp Corp (TYO:6753), as well as SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
The new fund will seek to buy both majority and minority interests in public and private companies, in emerging businesses to the most established firms worth billions of dollars. It hopes to obtain access to long-term investment opportunities worth $100 million and more.
The fund will invest in a range of sectors including mobile computing, computational biology, communications infrastructure, consumer internet businesses as well as financial technology.
SoftBank is the best-performing stock within the Topix Core 30 index. Shares were up 2.1 percent early in Tokyo’s afternoon session.