SoftBank Seeks to Assuage Investors on Mobile Outage Before $23 Billion IPO

Takahiko Hyuga and Anna Kitanaka, Bloomberg News

Junichi Miyakawa Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp. and its bankers are holding emergency conference calls with institutional investors on Friday to address any concerns they might have after the carrier’s mobile service went down days before a 2.65 trillion yen ($23.5 billion) initial public offering.

Three conference calls are being hosted at separate times and regions by Nomura Holdings Inc., Mizuho Financial Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to a document obtained by Bloomberg. SoftBank executives will be joining the call, including Chief Technology Officer Junichi Miyakawa and Chief Financial Officer Kazuhiko Fujihara.

Representatives for SoftBank and the three banks declined to comment on the calls.

The outages were caused by a problem with software supplied by Ericsson AB and impacted mobile phone users in 11 countries, including Britain and Japan, according to a statement by SoftBank. Users across Japan were unable to connect for more than four hours on Thursday.

To contact the reporters on this story: Takahiko Hyuga in Tokyo at thyuga@bloomberg.net;Anna Kitanaka in Tokyo at akitanaka@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Robert Fenner at rfenner@bloomberg.net, Reed Stevenson, Edwin Chan