WeWork Rebrands to ‘The We Company’ After Softbank Calls Off Investment Deal of $16 Billion
The coworking giant WeWork which operates on a global level has recently announced the rebranding of its name to The We Company in more than 25 countries. This new development has been initiated as a follow-up to its plan of expanding its business to residential and educational units in addition to the already existing commercial office workspaces. Instead of just providing people with the option of renting desks, the company plans to impact other important areas of people’s lives.
The We Company plans to make progress in the three main branches which include:
- WeWork concerning all the coworking spaces provided by the company globally
- WeLive is meant for residential real estate and apartments which is set to promote community-oriented co-living
- WeGrow looking over the education sector under which an elementary school in New York is already set up.
The amalgamation of all the three above-mentioned sectors is what will be called the ‘WeCompany’.
WeWork also recently started its own incubator for startups called WeWork Labs.
The announcement was made by Adam Neumann, CEO and Co-founder of WeWork at the company’s internal annual conference on 8th January 2019. This was followed by a blog which he published on the WeWork website explaining how the new plan setup would be executed. In the blog, he mentioned, “We’re taking a step toward truly realizing our vision by beginning our next chapter. WeWork is announcing ‘The We Company’, bringing all of our business ambitions together to operate in service of how we work, how we live, and how we grow.”
Notably, the news of the company’s decision to rebrand its name came just a day after reports surfaced regarding the failure of SoftBank ( the largest investor of WeWork) to grant an investment of $16 billion which was the plan initially. The Japanese investment firm, Softbank had previously made a deal of investing an extra $16 billion which was then called off due to a wrecking market turmoil. Instead of it, SoftBank will now be investing just $2 billion. The initial deal would have given WeWork an opportunity to achieve a greater position in the growing market but now the staggering difference in the numbers has given rise to some serious queries regarding the company’s first battle with a real economic downturn in its nine years of existence. This is, however, a piece of interesting news for WeWork Competitors.
Despite the looming threat, Neumann is positive that this problem will not cause any damage to his company as he believes experimenting and taking risks have always led to fruitful discoveries. To date, WeWork Company has managed to reach approximately 5 million people; making huge developments as it went along its journey. During the founding days of WeWork, Adam and his co-founder Miguel McKelvey had mapped out their journey while coming up with projects like WeSail, WeSleep, and WeBank which may be worked upon this year.
It will be interesting to see how Adam Neumann deals with the situation while handling the upcoming projects simultaneously.
As of now, WeWork is focusing on the Australian Coworking Scenario and is actively opening new spaces. Read about some of WeWork Coworking Spaces in Australia to get a detailed idea.
