TOKYO — Japanese know-how investor SoftBank Group reported Thursday a lack of 970 billion yen ($7 billion) for the fiscal 12 months that simply ended — the second 12 months in a row of purple ink.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. racked up a 1.7-trillion-yen ($13-billion) loss the earlier fiscal 12 months.
The most recent outcomes got here from large losses on its investments, referred to as the SoftBank Imaginative and prescient Fund, amid a worldwide plunge in know-how shares.
The good points from transactions in Chinese language e-commerce large Alibaba weren’t sufficient to offset the funding losses, the corporate stated in an announcement.
Gross sales for the fiscal 12 months, which led to March, rose 6% from the earlier fiscal 12 months to six.57 trillion yen ($49 billion).
SoftBank invests in a sprawling array of corporations, together with Uber, DoorDash, T-Cellular and Arm. However the worth of its holdings declined throughout numerous financial uncertainties, together with the U.S. banking disaster and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, based on SoftBank.
The corporate, which was the primary to supply the Apple iPhone in Japan, stated it’ll evaluation its funding choices extra fastidiously and scale back money owed, repeatedly emphasizing the phrase “protection” in its earnings presentation.
Softbank additionally promised to monetize a few of its investments, saying it is planning an preliminary public providing of Arm.
Geopolitical dangers stay a priority, in addition to inflation and different components that might trigger an additional tumble on markets, SoftBank stated. However the firm insisted, because it has prior to now, that it was heading in the right direction in investing in technological innovation like synthetic intelligence, biotechnology, the metaverse and robotics.
SoftBank’s charismatic founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, a graduate of the College of California, Berkeley, was one of many first believers within the web enterprise, lengthy earlier than the concept caught on in Japan.
SoftBank doesn’t give earnings projections.
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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama