SoftBank Group posts 3rd straight yearly loss on investment losses

TOKYO (Kyodo) — SoftBank Group Corp. announced on Monday a net loss of 227.65 billion yen ($1.5 billion) for the fiscal year ended March, extending its streak of red ink for the third consecutive year as it continues seeing a sluggish rebound in its investment portfolio.

The net loss shrunk from the 970.14 billion yen logged the previous year as recent stock rallies worldwide boosted the value of its stock holdings. Its sales rose 2.8 percent to 6.76 trillion yen, the company said.

“We have made a significant recovery since the huge losses we suffered about two years ago,” Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said at a press conference. “From now on, we will try our utmost so the numbers will stay in the positive realm.”

SoftBank Group booked a record net loss of 1.71 trillion yen in fiscal 2021 on the back of a global stock rout after logging the highest profit for a Japanese company the previous year.

For fiscal 2023, the investment performance at its flagship Vision Fund significantly improved from the previous year, booking a profit of 724.34 billion yen compared with a loss of 5.28 trillion yen a year earlier.

Some of the tech firms the fund invested in, such as Bytedance Ltd., the operator of the short-video app TikTok, and South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang Inc., increased in value. The fund also benefited from listing its subsidiary, chip designer Arm Holdings Plc, on the U.S. Nasdaq stock exchange in September.

Total investment losses, including those by SoftBank Group, stood at 559.35 billion yen for the fiscal year, improving from the 835.06 billion yen loss a year earlier.

Among the investments that contributed to the losses, SoftBank cited a decrease in the value of shared workplace provider WeWork Inc., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November.

SoftBank Group said it has made a new investment worth $3.9 billion in the fiscal year, slightly down from the $4.0 billion the previous year. Most of the new investments were in industry automation, robotics and self-driving technologies, it said.

“We ramped up our defense while we also managed to make investments that we needed to do,” Goto said.

The Japanese tech conglomerate does not provide a full-year outlook for fiscal 2024.

Goto said CEO Masayoshi Son has been absent from the company’s earnings press conferences in recent years as he focuses on charting the firm’s artificial intelligence-based growth strategy. He added that Son will update investors on what he has been up to at an annual general meeting in June.