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SIMI's Arora appointed COO of SoftBank Group

  • Andrew Woodman
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SoftBank Corp. has named Nikesh Arora - CEO of SoftBank investment unit SoftBank Internet & Media Inc.(SIMI) - as the Japanese telecom and internet conglomerate's new president and COO.

The move will see the company's billionaire founder Masayoshi Son step down as president, although he willl continue to act as CEO. This is part of a broader restructuring that will see the company change its name from SoftBank Corp. to SoftBank Group Corp.

Arora is the fourth non-Japanese executive on SoftBank's 17-member board. The others are Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba Group, Mark Schwartz, former president of Goldman Sachs Japan, and Ronald Fisher, former CEO of Phoenix Technologies.

Arora joined the company to head up SIMI - now renamed SB Group US - in September of last year. He was previously a senior vice president and chief business officer at Google, a senior advisor at Silver Lake Partners, and chief marketing officer of T-Mobile international. He also founded T-Motion, the mobile multimedia unit of T-Mobile.

During his tenure as CEO of SIMI, Arora oversaw a number of high-profile investments in Asian tech start-ups. The most recent was in January when SIMI led a $600 million round for Chinese taxi-booking app Kuadi Dache. Prior to that it made significant investments in Indian e-commerce firm Snapdeal, Indian taxi-booking app Ola, Indonesian e-commerce platform Tokopedia, and Indian property portal Housing.com.

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