President-elect Donald Trump provided new details Wednesday of his agreement with SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son to generate thousands of jobs in the United States, part of a string of unusually direct negotiations between Trump and corporate America.
Trump said telecom corporation Sprint, owned by Tokyo-based SoftBank, will move 5,000 jobs to the United States from other countries, but he provided no other details. In a statement, however, Sprint appeared to contradict Trump’s claim, indicating that only some of the jobs will be shifted from foreign locations and that the rest will be newly created positions.
Sprint did not specify which countries the jobs might come from but said the additions would include posts in customer service and sales. It expected to add them by the end of fiscal year 2017.
Trump also said Virginia-based start-up OneWeb would create 3,000 jobs. That company recently received about $1 billion in financing from SoftBank.
Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida, Trump said that bringing jobs to the United States from other countries was “a nice change” and credited Son for the deal.
Son met with Trump in New York earlier this month at the president-elect’s transition team headquarters in Trump Tower. At that time, Son announced plans to invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 new jobs – moves that Trump said were spurred by his presidential victory. It remained unclear whether the jobs announced Wednesday were part of that promise.
However, in the month before the presidential election, SoftBank said it intended to contribute $25 billion to an international fund that would invest in global technology companies over the next five years. It is unclear whether that money is funding any of the U.S. initiatives Son has announced with Trump since then.