Technology investor SoftBank hits second consecutive quarterly profit
Performance at its portfolio crown jewel Arm Holdings bodes well for a return to growth, the Japanese company says
Tokyo — Technology investor SoftBank Group reported a second consecutive quarterly net profit on Monday, with performance at portfolio crown jewel Arm Holdings boding well for what the Japanese firm has said is a nascent return to growth.
SoftBank booked January-March profit of ¥328.9bn, though full-year earnings remained in the red.
In February, CFO Yoshimitsu Goto had declared SoftBank — known for volatile earnings and outsize bets on start-ups — to be returning to a “growth trajectory”.
Tech stocks including British chip design firm Arm performed well in the quarter on unabated enthusiasm for the likely beneficiaries of the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).
Founder and CEO Masayoshi Son has championed AI but SoftBank has not been a major investor in firms developing generative AI models such as ChatGPT that have caught the popular imagination. Instead, it owns 90% of Arm, the value of which has surged on AI hype.
Still, that surge did not contribute to SoftBank profit as Arm is a subsidiary. And whereas Arm reported record January-March sales on licence and royalty revenue, SoftBank booked a ¥33bn loss from its Arm investment in the past fiscal year on increased expenses related to stock compensation and hiring.
Arm’s headcount grew by more than 1,100 in the year ended March, with more than 80% of net new hires being in engineering.
SoftBank has said group assets are AI-focused and that Arm will power companies across the Japanese firm’s portfolio.
Most of SoftBank’s investments through its Vision Fund unit suffered valuation loss in the fourth quarter, leaving it with a ¥57.5bn loss. A bright spot came in the form of South Korean e-commerce firm Coupang, which generated about $600 million in unrealised investment gain.
Overall, SoftBank’s fourth-quarter net profit compared with a ¥32bn loss in the same period a year earlier, when capital raised using its Alibaba Group stake cushioned writedowns in the value of Vision Fund private portfolio firms.
Reuters