SoftBank will sell ¥1T ($6.3B) of retail bonds next month, the largest such offering ever by a Japanese company and well past the ¥600B record SoftBank itself set in 2025, with pricing due September 4 and an indicative coupon of 4.3% to 4.9%. The money repays ¥400B of maturing Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks bonds and funds the AI spending behind a commitment of more than $60B to OpenAI. It’s the third retail bond this year, after ¥418B in April and ¥260B in June, and the reliance on individual savers is a matter of necessity, because banks have trouble holding seven-year paper from an issuer S&P rates BB+, one notch below investment grade. Bloomberg Intelligence puts the remaining gap above $20B even after this sale, which points to offshore issuance soon.
