SoftBank’s Vision Fund, the brainchild of company founder Masayoshi Son, has faced a number of headwinds, including a slump in tech stocks on the back of rising interest rates, a troubled Chinese market and geopolitics.
Kentaro Takahash | Bloomberg | Getty Images
SoftBank posted one of its biggest losses at its investment unit Vision Fund during the fiscal first quarter, as rising interest rates continue to weigh on tech stocks.
The Japanese giant’s Vision Fund posted a loss of 2.93 trillion Japanese yen ($21.68 billion) for the June quarter. This is the second largest quarterly loss for the Vision Fund.
This contributed to a net loss of 3.16 trillion yen for the quarter for SoftBank, compared to 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, was hit by a slump in high-growth stocks as rampant inflation prompted the Federal Reserve and other central banks to hike interest rates.
Masayoshi Son, the outspoken founder of SoftBank and the mastermind behind the Vision Fund, said in May the company would go into “defense mode” and be more “conservative” on its investment pace after suffering a record JPY3.5 trillion loss at the investment entity had recorded for the last financial year.
SoftBank said it has seen stock prices decline across a wide range of its portfolio companies, “driven primarily by the global downtrend in stock prices amid growing concerns of an economic recession caused by inflation and rising interest rates.”
Shares in 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 stock prices of private companies in its portfolio also fell.
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