The Vision Fund, SoftBank’s flagship investment arm, posted a fourth consecutive quarterly loss as tech valuations continue to hit the Japanese giant’s slump.
The Vision Fund segment reported a pre-tax loss of JPY 660 billion ($5 billion) for the December quarter. SoftBank’s Vision Fund’s loss on investments was 730.35 billion yen in the three-month period. SoftBank Group reported a net loss of 783.4 billion yen, returning to a quarterly loss after reporting a profit in the July-September quarter.
It’s been a tough time for SoftBank, whose Vision Fund has stakes in a range of tech companies, from start-ups to publicly traded behemoths. SoftBank said some of the largest losses in the recent quarter were due to an “overall decline in the fair value of portfolio companies, primarily reflecting declines in the value of underperforming companies and declines in the share price of companies comparable to the market”. Among SoftBank’s worst-performing investments are Chinese AI firm SenseTime, which is down 57% in the past year, and Indonesian tech group GoTo which has seen its shares fall more than 65%. %.