SoftBank Group Corp., a Japanese technology company, continues to lose money for the first quarter of its fiscal year as investments in technology deteriorated as a result of a market downturn.
Regarding your article, Vision Funds posted a GAIN of $0.8 billion for the quarter, taking into account shared assets like its ARM holdings. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1 and 2 and its Latin American fund together posted a quarterly investment loss of 13 billion yen ($91 million), which is much less than the 2,919 billion yen loss from a year ago ($20 billion).
According to the company, investments in the three funds collectively lost $6.3 billion as of June 30. SoftBank Group posted a net loss of 477.6 billion yen ($3.3 billion) overall, which was unexpected given that the majority of investment analysts were expecting a return to profitability this quarter.
CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said in the presentation today that “we are carefully and slowly moving back to investment activities,” adding that it would “keep focusing on the AI trend.”
SoftBank’s Investment Portfolio: Gains and Losses Shape Quarterly Performance
According to the company, its overall commitments across its LatAm fund, Vision Funds 1 and 2, and other funds amount to $166.2 billion. It estimated the fair value of the assets at $140.3 billion and the acquisition costs at $146.6 billion.
According to SoftBank, its Vision Funds 1 and 2 posted quarterly losses of 38.749 billion yen and 46.860 billion yen, While other investments saw a gain of 25.070 billion and the LatAm fund a gain of 47.496 billion, respectively. The sale of Pismo, one of SoftBank’s portfolio companies, to Visa for $1 billion in June gave the Latin American industry a significant boost.
SoftBank’s entire total loss on investments for the quarter was 699 billion yen (about $4.9 billion), which was further hampered by share price reductions in its interests in Alibaba, Deutsche Telekom, and T-Mobile US.
From its first, earlier Vision Fund, SoftBank has advanced far more. According to the company, out of the 94 investments it made from the nearly $90 billion fund, “fair value” was split between about $37.5 billion in private enterprises, $20.5 billion in public companies, and $44.2 billion in total investments. Its $108 billion Vision Fund 2 has a fair value of only $32.2 billion.
According to him, VF2 will continue to lead investments because it is still a young company.
In addition, 94% of the companies in SoftBank’s portfolio across all of its funds currently have a cash runway of more than 12 months.
As we hear more from SoftBank on Arm and its AI efforts during the presentation, we’ll update this post.
A new company named SB Intuitions was launched last week by the corporation’s Japanese affiliate, SoftBank, which also manages its domestic business and is building a Large Language Model and generative AI services exclusively for Japanese and Japan’s businesses and customers. Along with a joint venture to build services for third parties, the company also made a significant investment in Symbiotic, an AI-based warehouse logistics and robotics company, in July.
