Softbank Group Reports $7.18 Billion Net Loss for Fiscal Year Ended in March due to Record Losses of Vision Funds

Japanese corporation Softbank Group published reporting for the fiscal year ended in March, reporting a net loss of ¥970 billion ($7.18 billion). The main reason for the weak results is the record losses of Vision Funds, an investment fund owned by SoftBank Group, which at the end of the year amounted to $32 billion, which is almost 70% more than a year earlier.

Vision Funds, which includes two funds – Vision Fund 1 and Vision Fund 2, continues to suffer losses due to a lack of profits amid a weakening global economy among startups in which the fund invests, including Chinese AI developer SenseTime, American food delivery service DoorDash and Indonesian taxi service GoTo. Thus, due to the write-off of the value of assets, the value of the Vision Fund 2 portfolio at the end of the year was $31 billion, while the cost of acquiring these assets was $49.9 billion.

In the middle of last year, the head of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, announced the transfer of the corporation to “defense mode”, given the difficult economic situation. The regime provides for a sharp reduction in investment and the sale of part of the assets. So, in a year, the corporation made investments totaling only $3.14 billion, while a year earlier this amount exceeded $44 billion. In addition, in order to raise funds, SoftBank sold part of its stakes in large companies such as T-Mobile and Alibaba, as well as all of its shares in Uber.

Commenting on the results of the corporation, SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said that this was an unstable financial year, saturated with geopolitical risks and marked by the instability of the financial system. But, in his opinion, in the current quarter of the new financial year, “we can expect some signs of improvement, although not a fundamental solution to all of the above problems.”

Alena Miklashevskaya