Billionaire Taizo Son ditches Japan to start afresh in Singapore

SINGAPORE (April 18): 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 US$100 million ($140 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.”

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