The Japanese holding company SoftBank sold almost all of its shares to the Chinese Internet corporation Alibaba. Writes about it Financial Times (FT), citing her review of SoftBank’s corporate filings. According to the FT, the value of the stake sold was $7.2 billion. After the release of this news, Alibaba shares fell 5%.
SoftBank has owned a substantial stake in Alibaba since 2000, when it invested $20 million in the then-small company in exchange for a 30% stake. Last year, the holding began to actively reduce its share – for example, in August it reduced its share from 23.7% to 14.6%, earning $ 34 billion from this. According to experts, the sale of a stake in Alibaba is connected, among other things, with SoftBank’s own problems. – Recently, he regularly suffers losses, the holding ended 2022 with a loss of $ 60 billion.
In addition, back in 2021, Softbank announced that it would reduce investment in China due to government pressure on IT companies. Shortly before this, Chinese regulators launched an investigation into Alibaba. “The Chinese regulatory environment in the Internet sector has tightened significantly in recent years, and SoftBank is simply responding to the changing environment, as it has done before. This is in line with expectations that the share of Chinese equities in investment will decline,” said Shinji Moriyuki, an analyst at SBI Securities.
