Published: Monday, May 13, 2020
TOKYO – SoftBank Group’s losses for its fiscal year ended March were reduced to less than a quarter compared with a year ago, thanks to a decline in investment losses, the Japanese tech company announced Monday.
SoftBank Group Corp., based in Tokyo, saw its annual sales rise 2.8% to $6.76 trillion yen (43 billion dollars). The fiscal year losses dropped to 227.6 bn yen (about $1.5 billion), from 970 bn yen the year before.
SoftBank Group has recorded its second consecutive quarterly profit. The company, which invests heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, autonomous vehicles, and other technologies, made 231 billion Japanese yen ($1.5billion) between January-March. This is a dramatic turnaround from the 57.6 billion loss it had a year ago.
The two most recent quarters were in the black after four consecutive quarters of losses.
Alibaba, a Chinese company that operates in e-commerce and cloud computing, as well as digital media, was one of the investment losses during the fiscal year. This offset gains made by its T-Mobile holdings.
SoftBank’s British subsidiary Arm, which designs semiconductors and software, has seen its value surge in recent months. However, this was not reflected in their earnings. Last year, Arm was listed on Nasdaq.
Some shares in the SoftBank Vision Fund lost value. WeWork, the provider of shared workspaces, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. These losses were offset by the gains of other holdings like ByteDance – the Chinese owner behind the popular video sharing app TikTok.
SoftBank, founded and led by Masayoshi son, a billionaire visionary, invests in Yahoo Japan, as well as Line. Son will make his pitch on the future of AI during the shareholders meeting in the second half of this year. He did not attend the earnings presentation.
Yoshimitsu goto, the Chief Financial Officer of the company, explained to a reporter that Son was busy working on what they call “the AI age.”
SoftBank Vision Fund 1 logged an overall gain of $16.7 Billion since its inception. SVF2 lost $19.3 Billion. Both funds suffered losses in the fiscal year ending March.
Goto said that the initial hard years for Vision Fund investments are now behind us, and it’s expected they will become stable.
He told reporters that “the performance will improve significantly.”
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Yuri Kageyama is on X: https://twitter.com/yurikageyama
Source: ABC News