On the morning of July 20, 2017, at the luxurious Prince Park Tower hotel in Tokyo, Masayoshi Son emerged on stage in front of a packed conference hall, his diminutive silhouette backlit by bright white lights. Son, the CEO of Japanese internet, energy and financial conglomerate SoftBank Group, was dressed simply, as is his habit, in a grey suit and a striped shirt. He smiled and introduced himself in Japanese.

Son is known for his fanciful analogies and long speeches. In 2010, his talk about his “300-year plan for the future” opened with a reflection on the nature of sorrow, with Son asking rhetorically, “What is the saddest thing in life? What gives you utmost happiness?” In 2016, he equated the Internet of Things (IoT) to the Cambrian era’s explosion of life, comparing the evolutionary advantage conferred to the first species with eyes to the combination of sensors and AI enabled by the IoT.

Addressing hundreds of technologists and entrepreneurs, he compared SoftBank to the gentry of the Industrial Revolution, a privileged class that invested in technology and science for the common good. Two months earlier, SoftBank had launched a $100 billion investment arm, the Vision Fund – the biggest tech fund in history. In Son’s metaphor, the Vision Fund was the gentry of the information revolution. “I really don’t want to go to sleep,” he said. “I don’t want to waste time. These are very exciting times.”


Many of the CEOs in the audience that day were recipients of the fund’s investment. Without exception, they had all met Son privately, either in his office in Shiodome, Tokyo, or in his $117.5 million mansion in Woodside, California. Most describe the legendary investor – known as Masa – as soft-spoken, a man with a modest bearing and a prescient vision of the future: a reputation substantiated by his achievements.

In the 1970s, Son emigrated to America to study. At the time, he had only a rudimentary knowledge of English, and made his first million by importing Japanese arcade games such as Space Invaders. It was Son who, in 1996, offered budding entrepreneur Jerry Yang, then CEO of a struggling startup called Yahoo!, $100m in investment. His insight paid off. By 2000, Yahoo! had become the dominant web search engine in the pre-crash era of the internet.

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That was the year Son met a young Chinese teacher and founder of an e-commerce firm called Alibaba. He told Jack Ma to accept $20m in investment, with the promise that he would transform Ma’s company into the next Yahoo! Today, when Son makes a new investment, he sometimes tells founders that they too can be as big as Alibaba, as big as one of the biggest companies in the world. “In 2000, he already knew that China was going to be big so he just decided to invest,” Eugene Izhikevich, CEO of the AI startup Brain, says. “After the dot.com bubble collapse, he was investing in China. You had to drive on a dirt road between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. He has a gift of seeing things before they become reality. What’s obvious to him becomes, ten years later, obvious to everyone else.”

At the event in Tokyo, Son proceeded to introduce CEOs to the stage. First, he welcomed the founder of robotics company Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert, a man who wants to change the world by building robots with biomechanical abilities superior to those of humans. (SoftBank bought the company from Alphabet for an undisclosed sum.) Raibert brought with him Spot Mini, a four-legged robot that promptly started demonstrating its locomotor skills. “Masa, I think you may have to back up because you’re in the way,” Raibert warned Son. “We don’t have it detecting people yet.” Raibert finished by stating his belief that “robots will be bigger than the internet”, and thanked SoftBank for backing him up. Son thanked him in return and said: “We’re going to change the world together. We’re going to put lots of AI into robots.”


Masayoshi Son addresses entrepreneurs in 2017 Splash News

Next was Greg Wyler, founder of OneWeb, who pointed out that, for all the talk about a hyperconnected future, the reality is that 54 per cent of the planet had no access to the internet. He detailed his plan to deploy 900 non­-­geostationary ­satellites that would ensure the remotest corners of the world would have access to the internet by 2027. As he finished, Wyler thanked SoftBank for its support. “We’re going to change the world, we’re going to connect everybody into this internet,” Son responded as he accompanied him off stage.

Artificial intelligence – and its accessory components of ubiquitous data, high-speed connections and autonomous robots – was the common denominator between the speakers that day: Helmy Eltoukhy, chief executive of Guardant Health, wanted to conquer cancer with data; Matt Barnard, founder of indoor farming platform Plenty, was using machine learning to grow plants in an optimised environment; and Bill Huang, the entrepreneur behind startup Cloud Minds, wanted to build the world’s first cloud-based robot. “All of a sudden we could help guide a blind person with sensors,” he proclaimed. “We can replace guide dogs!”

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Before the final talks, Son took to the stage again and reminisced: “When I was 17 years old, the very first time I saw a photo of a microprocessor made me cry. I was overwhelmed.” He then introduced Simon Segars, the CEO of British chip-design firm Arm Holdings. “Our first processors were the size of a shirt button,” Segars began. “Now we can deliver thousands of times more processing power with a chip the size of a pinhead.” Arm microprocessors were being used in robotic surgery, autonomous vehicles and smart cameras, but the AI future would be unrealistic – too power-hungry and beset by time lags – if all that data had to be sent to the cloud for processing and then back. “If every person with an Android does three minutes of voice recognition a day, Google would have to double their data centres,” Segars said. The next generation of microprocessors would have to incorporate AI and process data on the sensor itself. “We can’t do it on our own,” he told the audience. “We have to work together in partnership with other companies to deploy these technologies.”


At the end of the talk, Son shook Segars’ hand. He said that Arm is indispensable not just to SoftBank, but to the whole of humankind. “And now they are a member of our family,” Son continued, turning to the crowd.“If we can join forces, we can be the gentry of this new generation, making the future a better place to live.” He then bowed and left the stage.

Helmey Eltoukhy, chief executive of Guardant Health Benedict Evans

Son has obsessively been trying to make SoftBank the world’s biggest company since the day he founded it in 1981, as a PC software distributor (SoftBank stands for Bank of Software) – the day when he, a 24-year old entrepreneur, stood on a crate in front of his two employees and excitedly promised that one day they would be the greatest in the world. Those employees quit a few days later, but Son, now 61, relentlessly pursued his ambition, his “300-year vision”: a technology revolution that will ultimately culminate in the singularity, a point in history where AI supersedes human intelligence and redefines every single industry in the global economy.

In that version of the future, SoftBank won’t be the next Google, the next Apple, or the next Microsoft – Son doesn’t believe that one brand or one business model could ever be capable of delivering the singularity. What will do so is what Son calls the “cluster of number ones” strategy: a SoftBank-led ecosystem of AI companies, spanning all industries from healthcare to transportation, from ride-hailing to robotics, a diversity that underpins the Vision Fund’s investment portfolio.

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“We want to form a coalition of like-minded comrade entrepreneurs,” Son told the audience at the 2017 conference. “A revolution can never be realised with the power of one.” And at the centre of that ecosystem is the company that designs the small, low-power processors present in 95 per cent of all smartphones, not to mention most smart speakers, health trackers, drones and TVs: Arm Holdings.

Son became familiar with Segars in 2006, when he first met the then CEO of Arm, Warren East, and Segars was one of the firm’s first employees. At the time, Arm already enjoyed a dominant stake in the nascent mobile market. This fact alone impressed Son. He knew that mobiles would soon outperform PCs, and as a result the internet’s centre of gravity would move from desktops to the smartphone. Son envisaged that the low-power, high-processing architecture of the Arm microchips would be the centre of the future digital economy.

That insight was behind SoftBank’s acquisition of Vodafone Japan, a struggling mobile carrier beset by connectivity issues and unfashionable handsets, a few weeks prior to his meeting with the Arm executives. SoftBank’s board had been sceptical about the acquisition, but Son was adamant. Besides, he had a strategic advantage. Prior to the acquisition, Son had travelled to California to meet Steve Jobs. He brought with him a hand-drawn sketch of a smartphone and showed it to the Apple CEO. (“It looked like a toad with the battery stuck out,” Son said in a 2016 interview with The Nikkei.) Jobs hated the ugly sketch but he told Son that his intuition was right. Jobs had been developing the first prototypes of the iPhone. Son left from the meeting with a commitment that, in case the Vodafone acquisition went ahead, he would be granted an exclusive deal to distribute the iPhone in Japan.

Segars and Son kept in contact, meeting a couple more times in 2006, then again in 2014 and 2015. By the time Segars replaced East as chief executive in 2013, Arm – just as Son predicted – had consolidated its marketshare in the chip industry, licensing its product to Apple, Samsung, Nvidia and Qualcomm. And as Son determined, Vodafone Japan (now SoftBank Mobile) had become one of Japan’s leading mobile companies – thanks to its exclusivity deal with Apple’s iPhone.

In June 2016, Segars met Son for dinner at the latter’s mansion in California. Segars would later describe it as the most important job interview of his life. He just didn’t know it at the time. During that meeting, Segars shared with Son the dilemma that he was facing at Arm – but noted that it also presented multiple huge opportunities. With the ­smartphone market saturated and growth margins reduced, Arm would have to significantly lower profit margins in order to make long-term investments in areas such as AI, sensors, 5G and ­autonomous vehicles. “We had to have tough conversations with our ­stakeholders,” Segars says. “I remember being asked why all our margins were going down, and explaining that we’re investing in the long-term opportunities. I still vividly remember the look of shock on one guy’s face.”

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A few days after their meeting, Son called Segars: “I need to speak to your chairman as soon as I can.” “I’m sorry, It’s not going to happen,” Segars replied. Arm’s chairman, Stuart Chambers, was holidaying on a yacht in the Mediterranean. But Son insisted: “No, no, no. You’ve got to make this happen. I am going to fly you out. Get into the nearest port, I will fly you there and I will fly out – and we will have this meeting.”

They met at The Pineapple, a seafood restaurant on the marina in Marmaris, on the Turkish riviera. Son had booked out every table – when Segars and Chambers arrived, there was no one inside apart from the waiters. When Son arrived, he sat down and told the British executives that he wanted to buy Arm, and made them a series of promises: the company would remain an independent subsidiary of Softbank; he wouldn’t interfere in the day-to-day management of Arm; and the company would be allowed to invest all the profits into research and development.

“I was trying to play it as cool as I possibly could,” Segars recalls. “We listened and you do what you’re supposed to do, which is not agree to anything, say as little as possible.”

Segars and Chambers returned to Cambridge and relayed the offer to the Arm board. In a week, a price was agreed; due diligence was concluded in just two weeks; the whole process took ten weeks. “To acquire a FTSE 100 company in that short period of time was breathtaking,” says Ian Thornton, the vice-president of investor relations for Arm. Rene Haas, the president of Arm’s Intellectual Property Group agrees: “These processes can drag on for years, but this was crazy fast. They were like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Move this thing.’ It went literally at the speed of light. I don’t think physics would’ve allowed it to go any faster in terms of regulatory laws that had to take place. It went down about as fast as it can possibly go.”

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One Sunday, Arm’s executive committee, which up to that point had not been privy to the ongoing ­negotiations, received a text message from Segars convening a meeting that evening. “I texted another member of the exec committee who was due at the meeting,” says Haas. “We were all like, ‘Simon is resigning? We had no idea.’” That evening the Arm executives met in the company boardroom. As well as beer and crisps, Segars served up a revelation. “The cat is out of the bag,” he told them. “Tomorrow it will be formally announced that SoftBank has bought Arm.”

To many of those in the room, the announcement made no sense. Why would SoftBank, a Japanese telco, buy Arm, a chip IP licensing firm? “I was thinking: who’s this Masa guy?” Haas recalls. “What is he about? Does he really understand what we do? I went home and googled SoftBank and Masa.”

On Monday, July 18, 2016, Son started the day with an early meeting with then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. Following the Brexit referendum the month before, the government was apprehensive about a foreign takeover of what was the UK’s most valuable technology company. Son agreed a post-offer undertaking – a series of legally binding promises to the UK’s takeover panel that, in the next five years, SoftBank would double the headcount and keep the headquarters in Cambridge.

That morning, the announcement of the acquisition was made: Arm had been bought by SoftBank for the price of £17 a share – £24 billion in total. Hermann Hauser, who had been involved in the early days of Arm and is regarded as one of the UK’s most ­influential entrepreneurs, told the BBC it was a “sad day” for British tech.

That afternoon, Son travelled to Cambridge to meet the members of Arm’s executive committee. “He was beaming like a kid who just got a new toy,” Haas remembers. “He was saying, ‘This is the most exciting day of my life. I have been watching this company for 30 years. I’ve just been so impressed with everything the company’s done.’”

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A month later, Arm’s executive team travelled to San Carlos, California, to meet Son and their counterparts at SoftBank International. The British kicked off the meeting with a ­presentation about revenue plans and forecasts for the next four quarters. “He couldn’t be less interested,” Haas says. “He was playing on his iPad.” However, when they started talking about the vision for the company, Son grew enthusiastic and he shared his own 300-year vision. By 2035 there will be a trillion connected devices, he said – a vast Internet of Things of autonomous vehicles, smart robots and artificially intelligent sensors, and Arm would be the company behind all these devices. “He was literally showing revenue charts and numbers out to 2035,” Haas says. “I remember thinking that very first time, ‘Is this theatrics?’ But now I realise he just thinks in a really big way. And you start thinking that if you can possibly pull all this off, it’s actually crazy.”

Jean Liu, president of DiDi. SoftBank and DiDi have partnered to launch a taxi-hailing service in Japan Trunk Xu

The acquisition of Arm was Europe’s biggest ever technology deal. It also marked the moment that many people in Britain, including business and technology insiders, had first heard of SoftBank. That this relatively unknown Japanese telco was in fact a heavyweight global investor came as a revelation to most, despite its run of big-ticket purchases. In 2013, SoftBank acquired US telco Sprint for $22.2 billion, and Finnish games developer Supercell for $1.5 billion. In 2014, it had launched an investment outpost in California – a precursor to the Vision Fund called SoftBank International, which had made early ­investments in companies such as ride-sharing startups DiDi in China and Ola Cabs in India, and Tokopedia, an Indonesian ­e-commerce company that currently has 80 million users. “We were a bit under the radar,” David Thévenon, a partner at SoftBank, says. “People were always confused by the name SoftBank. ‘Are you a bank? Are you a mobile operator?’ We had to keep explaining that we had been doing ­international investments for years.”

And once SoftBank was finally a recognisable name there was a new complication: it needed more money to keep investing. Finding a solution for that problem was the remit of a former Deutsche Bank debt trader by the name of Rajeev Misra.

Misra grew up in New Delhi. In 1981, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study mechanical engineering and computer science. He then worked at Los Alamos designing satellites, and on software simulations at a Philadelphia-based startup called Reality Technologies, before returning to business school. Misra met Son in 2002, when he was global head of credit, emerging markets at Deutsche Bank. He lent money to SoftBank and then helped it to structure the complex takeover of Vodafone Japan. They re-connected eight years later at a wedding in the summer of 2014. Alibaba – the company in which Son had invested $20m in 2010 – had recently pulled off the largest IPO in history. The windfall allowed SoftBank to expand globally, and Son wanted Misra to work for him again. “I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but it sounded exciting,” Misra recalls.

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To buy the British company, SoftBank was forced to sell shares in Alibaba and Supercell; the whole deal pushed the Japanese company’s debt to $105 billion. “We wanted to make investments in the AI revolution that was coming, and in all these companies going to disrupt every industry on the planet,” Misra says. “Financial services, cars, hotels, office space, residential brokerage, you name it. We felt we were restricted because we spend a lot of money. We said, let’s raise money. Let’s become the biggest investment fund on the planet.” Masa called it the Vision Fund.

The investment hypothesis underpinning the Vision Fund centres around scale: a winner-takes-all strategy. They targeted companies with 50 to 80 per cent market share, and over-invested to enable these companies to grow fast and globally. “That’s something I learned from Masa,” Misra says. “Is it more important to grow fast or to be efficient? Efficient means getting your costs right and your profits right. It’s not about counting the number of dollars that you spend on stationery that’s important, and building step by step in the US or in India. Our view is that companies need to scale first. Once you scale, you’ll get everything else right. The global barriers are coming down, so if you don’t become global fast, someone else will do it.”

And for that, of course, they were going to need capital – and lots of it. Initially, the fund was going to start with $30 billion – a huge sum, but not unheard of among global funds. That was until Masa decided that $100 billion would be better.

Rajeev Misra, CEO of the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund Jake Chesum

Misra and Son put together a presentation that showcased the fund’s investment track record – it’s portfolio at the time already included Arm, Sprint, SoftBank Mobile, Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan – and honed their sales pitch. In 2016, between September and December, they travelled the world, meeting companies in the US, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds in Asia and the Middle East. Though politely received, their proposal was mostly met with disbelief, with $100 billion for a single investment fund being viewed as a totally unrealistic sum to attempt to raise, regardless of ambition.

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However, in spite of the broadly sceptical reception, a few were intrigued by SoftBank’s proposition. One such person was Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

A 500-strong Saudi delegation visited Tokyo in May 2017. Before meeting Bin Salman, Son and Misra first pitched the idea of the Vision Fund to the prince’s closest advisers, introduced by two former colleagues of Misra’s at Deutsche Bank. A few days later, they received the Crown Prince at the palatial Geihinkan state guesthouse in central Tokyo. According to an interview Son gave to financier David Rubenstein later that year, Son told Bin Salman: “I want to give you a Masa gift, the Tokyo gift, a $1 trillion gift.” Bin Salman responded: “OK, now it’s interesting.” Son replied: “Here’s how I can give you a $1 trillion gift: you invest $100 billion in my fund, I give you a trillion.” Son left the meeting with a non-binding commitment of $45 billion over the next five years.

Six weeks later, the two men met again in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Son visited Aramco, the state oil company, and spent time with the executives of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. By then Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, Sharp and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala had also committed a further $20 billion, and SoftBank added $28 billion from its own balance sheet. A signing ceremony in Riyadh was held in May 2017 to coincide with Donald Trump’s first overseas trip as US president – and the $100 billion Vision Fund was officially launched.

SoftBank, which had never managed third-party money at this scale and had never launched a regulated fund, now owned the biggest investment fund in history, equal to all the money raised by US VCs in the previous 30 months. The fund’s CEO, Rajeev Misra, was under pressure. “We now had fiduciary responsibility to all these companies, to our partners, to the people of Saudi Arabia. And did we get the first call for someone looking for capital two years ago?” Misra recalls. “No.”

Stewart Butterfield co-founder of Slack, in which SoftBank took a $250m stake F. Scott Schafer

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One afternoon in December 2018, Misra welcomed Wired to the headquarters of the Vision Fund, in a four-storey Edwardian building in London’s Mayfair. He was barefoot and had rolled up his shirt sleeves, revealing a Shamballa bracelet on one wrist. During the conversation, his mood shifted between enthusiastic and pensive, at which point he would pause and puff on an electronic cigarette.

Currently, Misra’s Vision Fund has a portfolio of more than 60 companies. This includes an estimated $7 billion stake in US graphics processor manufacturer Nvidia; a $502 million stake in British startup Improbable, which develops large-scale virtual reality worlds for gaming and training; and a $250m stake in the productivity platform Slack. A consortium led by SoftBank has also invested around $8 billion in Uber.

Misra heads a team of managing partners – seven of them based at the fund’s Silicon Valley outpost, two in Japan, and two in London – who scrutinise dozens of companies weekly in search of potential opportunities for investment. They come together on a regular basis to collectively review the spread of deals presented by individual partners.

These ideas are then peer-reviewed, with due diligence being undertaken by an independent team in a rigorous vetting process that can take months to complete. At a later stage, the deals are submitted to SoftBank’s Investment Advisor Committee, which includes Son and Misra. If there is consensus about an idea, the entrepreneur is then invited to sit down with Son, who meets every single founder before a deal is closed.

“When I met him, in early 2017, I explained how my company had become a leading hotel company in India,” says Ritesh Agarwal, chief executive officer of Oyo Rooms, India’s largest hotel network. “I didn’t think the timing was right to expand to China. He told me that I should absolutely expand to China – and consider spending a lot of time there. In November, we set up our first hotel in Shenzhen. We are now among the top five hotel chains in China. His ability to think far ahead is unparalleled.”

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Ryan Pfluger / August

The lower limit for a Vision Fund investment is $100 million, but most are between $500 million to a few billion, typically for 20 to 40 per cent of the company. “It’s changed the game for investing in a dramatic way,” Michael Marks, CEO of the US construction startup Katerra, observes. “Tech companies are becoming billion-dollar businesses. I think that SoftBank was just the first to see that it could deploy much more capital and get big returns. It over-invests to anoint the winners. It may turn out it’s a colossal risk and doesn’t work out, but I think it will. It’s a ­fascinating experiment,” Marks says.

Of course, investments alone and the abundance of capital don’t reveal the true nature of SoftBank’s underlying strength: Son’s “cluster of number ones” strategy, the complex network of affiliated and portfolio companies whose whole is theoretically greater than the sum of its parts – an added value derived from the partnerships and business opportunities that come with being a part of the SoftBank family.

This is a global network that includes Apple, Qualcomm, Sharp, Alibaba, Sprint (the fourth-largest carrier in the US), Yahoo! Japan (which, unlike its US parent, remains the most popular website in its country) and SoftBank Mobile, whose $23.5 billion IPO last December was the second biggest market listing of all time. The Vision Fund is also one of the biggest foreign investors in India, China and Europe. It has a presence in Mumbai, Singapore, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. “When you think about investment, when you look at most of the American firms, they don’t do global, very few of them do true global stuff,” Thévenon says. “SoftBank, however, is everywhere.”

Companies have autonomy to pursue these partnerships, but these are often win-win synergies that can accelerate growth globally. Consider the example of Ping An Good Doctor, an AI provider of first-line healthcare, which signed an agreement with south-east Asian ride-sharing company Grab. In China, a trip to the doctor can last three hours for only 90 seconds of consultation, so Ping wants to use Grab’s geolocation platforms to accelerate the initial triage and screening process of patients.

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Oyo Rooms, has, through deploying a machine learning platform, managed to standardised its hotel experience globally – from tech-enabled check-ins to housekeeping. It ran a partnership campaign with DiDi in China using the slogan: “Ride comfortably with DiDi and stay comfortably with Oyo.”

Paytm, an Indian mobile wallet startup that processes 450 million transactions a month, recently launched PayPay in Japan with Yahoo! Japan.

And then, of course, there is Arm. In collaboration with Mapbox, Segars’ chip-design firm has already developed software that allows Arm-enabled devices automatically to classify road boundaries, lane markings, curbs, crossings and traffic signs. Boston Dynamics is also deploying Arm processors in the motor control of its latest robots.

These are the sorts of partnerships SoftBank has fostered, and they will allow Arm to remain at the centre of gravity of Son’s vision of the singularity, enabling a future that is populated by robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and a trillion connected devices.

“I think another very common theme that runs through all of our investments is really around data,” Jeffrey Housenbold, a managing partner at the Vision Fund, says. “It’s really about data and the merger of human and machine in this notion of the singularity and artificial intelligence. How do we process that data in order to make the world a better place – to make people happier, to enrich their lives, to provide better products and services? It doesn’t matter if it’s by using data to enable drug discovery or trying to make food delivery more efficient. Data runs across almost every one of our companies.”

That’s Masayoshi Son’s vision: a future where every time that we use our smartphone, or call a taxi, or order a meal, or stay in a hotel, or make a payment, or receive medical treatment, we will be doing so in a data ­transaction with a company that belongs to the SoftBank family. And, as Son likes to say: “Whoever controls data controls the world.”

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