The SoftBank Corp logo is displayed on the glass door of the company’s store in Tokyo, Japan, Wednesday, May 8, 2024.
Toru Hanuchi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Japanese giant Softbank Its Vision Fund technology investment unit made 608.5 billion yen ($3.96 billion) in the fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30, a jump in quarterly results after turning a profit in the three months to June.
The broader Vision Fund unit as a whole, which also takes into account non-investment results such as management fees and gains and losses attributable to third-party investors, reported earnings of 373.1 billion yen. The company announced a fiscal first-quarter loss of 204.3 billion yen.
The company attributed the lion’s share of the growth to valuation gains recorded by SoftBank Vision Fund 1, pointing to rising share prices of e-commerce company Coupang and Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing, as well as an increase in the value of its investments in China technology company ByteDance. .
Vision Fund already profits from success of smartphone chip designer’s September 2023 IPO Arm Holdingswhich holds an absolute majority stake of approximately 90%.
In recent years, Son’s technology group has taken a share of controversial high-value investments in companies that have either collapsed or had their valuations slashed. It’s now repositioning itself at the center of the artificial intelligence boom, and players like NVIDIA Rapid demand for chips and data center GPUs is paying off for these companies.
Early investor in Yahoo and Alibaba, son Call now At the end of September, the US giant Nvidia, with a market value of US$3.57 trillion, was “undervalued” and predicted that artificial intelligence 10,000 times smarter than humans would be available within 10 years media reports SoftBank will invest $500 million in the latest round of financing for major artificial intelligence company OpenAI.
SoftBank’s Tokyo-listed shares have risen about 51% so far this year.
The company is facing pressure from activist investor Elliott Management, which holds about $2 billion in SoftBank shares and has pushed for $15 billion in share buybacks, CNBC reported in June. The group announced in August that it would buy back 6.8% of the company’s available shares for 500 billion yen ($3.25 billion).
Japanese companies faced severe volatility in the summer quarter due to a rapid appreciation of the yen and a sharp sell-off in risk assets in August. Domestic markets have calmed down from the turmoil of the summer as Japan moves away from ultra-low interest rates, but analysts at Barclays note that the country’s economic outlook has yet to stabilize.
“Crucially, this volatility is likely to persist. Wage growth, especially in the services sector, is in line with the Bank of Japan’s expectations, leading many to expect another rate hike in December 2024 or January 2025. ” They wrote on November 8.
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