President-elect Donald Trump played a key role in encouraging Japan's SoftBank to invest in U.S. businesses like OneWeb, the founder and chairman of the internet satellite company told CNBC on Thursday.
Trump announced Wednesday that with the help of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Sprint and One Web will bring back a total of 8,000 jobs to the United States from overseas.
"The invigoration and excitement that … President-elect Trump brought to Masa and the way they worked together really energized the focus of the fund to invest this amount of money in the U.S.," OneWeb's Greg Wyler told "Squawk Box."
SoftBank is a stakeholder in both companies. Trump told reporters the Sprint and OneWeb jobs will contribute to SoftBank's pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the United States.
Wyler said plans for the Japanese telecommunications company to invest in the United States and in OneWeb were already in place, but Son's meeting with Trump on Dec. 5 at Trump Tower went so well that it inspired the SoftBank chief to invest even more.
"What was kind of interesting was we had been in discussions with Softbank, and then after he met with President-elect Trump, he [Son] came back and increased his investment in OneWeb," Wyler said.
The 3,000 jobs OneWeb will create will be quality opportunities, Wyler said. "These will be very high-tech, highly skilled manufacturing and engineering jobs," the OneWeb chief said.
And, though Wyler said the United States could always use more highly skilled laborers, the company will mainly look to U.S. applicants to fill its expanded workforce.
"The U.S. has a tremendous amount of highly skilled technical capability that really needs to be unlocked," Wyler said. "We have a great university system and a great base of skilled workers."
Running business out of the United States will also improve under Trump, Wyler contended.
"We're looking at every country of the world, we're looking at where we're going to put our assets and where we're going to deploy resources, and the U.S. under a President Trump, where he started to talk about a reduction in U.S. taxes to make it more fair or competitive on a global basis, is really important," he said.