Yahoo Japan to buy control of online fashion retailer Zozo
Yahoo Japan said on Thursday that it aims to buy 50.1 percent stake in online fashion retailer Zozo for about 400 billion yen (US$3.7 billion), Reuters reports.
Zozo founder Yusaku Maezawa will sell around 30 percent of the retailer in a tender offer to Yahoo Japan, leaving him with a stake of about 6 percent, and step down as CEO of the company, according to the report.
Yahoo Japan’s offer price of 2,620 yen per share represents a premium of around 21 percent compared to Zoro's Wednesday closing price.
Zozo has a market value of around 680 billion yen, according to Refinitiv data. The deal would give Maezawa a windfall or around US$2.3 billion.
“I will entrust Zozo to a new president and take my own path,” Maezawa said in a Twitter post.
The planned deal comes as Maezawa's firm, which runs the Zozotown online mall, has been struggling.
In the last financial year it booked its first annual drop in earnings due to a failed experiment with bespoke tailoring and clashes with fashion brands over discounting, the report noted.
Yahoo Japan is a consolidated subsidiary of SoftBank Corp, which in turn is controlled by tech conglomerate SoftBank Group.
-- Contact us at [email protected]
RC
-
Energising HK's creative industries through cultural big data Dr. Winnie Tang
The government has planned to allocate nearly HK$300 million for the development of Art Tech. How can the funding effectively improve the level of local culture and arts, and further consolidate Hong
-
How to well spend the HK$300 million allocated to art tech? Dr. Winnie Tang
Local movie director Chu Yuan passed away earlier. In a lament, film critic Ka Ming recalled Chu's five masterpieces in the 1960s and 1970s. In his remark, Ka criticised that like most old Hong Kong
-
A cross-border ‘yellow cow’ story Ben Kwok
Almost all overseas fellows of my age that I know came to Hong Kong during the pandemic only for one reason: to meet their parents as much as possible. But in order to see their parents in person,
-
Advancing responsible business conduct Hanscom Smith
We need only look at the front-page news to see that companies are reassessing their business practices in areas ranging from preventing and addressing forced labor in their supply chains,
-
Re-opening Hong Kong a must Brian YS Wong
Hong Kong’s value to its country remains its openness, cosmopolitanism, and fundamental willingness to embrace and take on the unknown. It is its internationalism, as opposed to inward-looking
