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Welcome to the Views Room, a podcast from Reuters' Breaking Views. I'm Anthony Curry and here with me on my co-hosts, Jennifer Saber and

Anna Shemansky. Welcome both. Hello. Hello. So we're jumping back on the campaign trail

for the U.S. presidential election later in the show, digesting the results in the Democratic primary

in New Hampshire, as well as the budget proposals from current White House incumbent Donald

John Trump.

First up, though, comes SoftBank Group. The $108 billion tech-to-telecom conglomerate run by Masayoshi's son has been on the receiving end of both good and bad news in recent days.

And Anthony and Jen are here to decipher it all for us. Anthony, let's start with the bad news. SoftBank now faces pressure from an activist investor. Who is it and what's behind the move? Well, it's everyone's, I'm not sure favorite activist investor is the right word, but the one that when you see, you think, we actually might need to do something. Elliott Management, which has gone after a number of high-profile targets in recent years, including, of course,

it's not forget, the Argentine government, often with a great deal of success.

And they've built, I think it's a roughly three billion stake in the company, came out late last week.

And I should just say that we are channeling here on the activist discussion,

but channeling our colleague in London, Liam Proud, who is currently off to another one of his targets, his own targets. That's Credit Suisse, he's changing its CEO, so he couldn't join us. But he has, in both this year and last year's predictions that we do at the beginning of each year, two years ago he said, SOSBank faces some problems with his investments. This year, he said, and now it's right for an activist investor. So he's got a two-for on this one, so I'm channeling all of his energy, hopefully, properly on this. Basically, SoftBank is right for this, and the basic argument is it's heavily undervalued in large part because of all the problems it had last year, not just last year, but especially last year, from the likes of

we work and Uber and some of its other smaller investments, really performing very poorly or not

well. And so what exactly does Elliot want it to do? Well, one thing they want to do is shake up

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