Salesforce spends $170M on own Japanese annex

Having acquired 95% share of Salesforce Japan, cloud computing hopes to pick up final shares by 2011

Enterprise cloud computing colossus Salesforce announced Wednesday that it has paid approximately $170 million to acquire 95% of the shares of its Japanese subsidiary, Kabushiki Kaisha salesforce.com ("Salesforce Japan"). It plans on purchasing the remaining shares “in the near term.”

Acknowledging Japan to be the largest revenue contributer in Asia Pacific for Salesforce, the cloud company sought full ownership of Salesforce Japan to “integrate and align its financial and operation functions,” thereby better reaching the profitable Asian market. (Interestingly, Salesforce says the purchase will have “immaterial impact” on the company’s 2011 fiscal year.)

Salesforce Japan was formed in 2000 as a joint venture between Salesforce and SunBridge Corporation, the Japanese branch of early-stage venture firm Sunbridge Partners. Before the purchase, Salesforce owned 73% controlling interest in the Japanese subsidiary. The minority of shares belonged to Sunbridge and other stockholders.

The announced purchase terminates the joint venture agreement between Salesforce and Sunbridge.

At the beginning of the month, Salesforce revealed plans to establish a data center in Tokyo to support its cloud computing efforts there. In the same week, Fujitsu and Salesforce together launched a new feature for Salesforce CRM.