SoftBank’s Vision Fund, the brainchild of company founder Masayoshi Son, has faced a number of headwinds, including a slide in tech stocks on rising interest rates, a difficult Chinese market and geopolitics.
Kentaro Takahash | Bloomberg | Getty Images
SoftBank posted one of its biggest losses at its Vision Fund investment arm for its fiscal first quarter as tech stocks continued to tumble amid rising interest rates.
The Japanese giant’s Vision Fund reported a loss of 2.93 trillion Japanese yen ($21.68 billion) in the June quarter. This is the second largest quarterly loss for the Vision Fund.
That contributed to a net loss of 3.16 trillion yen for the quarter for SoftBank, compared with a profit of 761.5 billion yen in the same period last year.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which launched in 2017 and invests in technology companies, has been hit by a slide in high-growth stocks as runaway inflation has prompted the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks to raise interest rates.
Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s outspoken founder and the mastermind behind the Vision Fund, said in May that the company would go into “defensive” mode and be more conservative in the pace of investments after registering a record 3.5 trillion Japanese yen loss in the investment block for the last fiscal year.
SoftBank said it saw a decline in the share prices of a wide range of its portfolio companies, which was “mainly caused by the global downward trend in share prices due to growing concerns about an economic recession driven by inflation and rising interest rates”.
Shares of companies ranging from South Korean e-commerce firm Coupang to DoorDash in the United States were hit hard in the second quarter of the year.
SoftBank said share prices of private companies in its portfolio also fell.
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