Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group swung to a quarterly profit on Monday (May 13) from a year earlier, reporting a net profit of 328.9 billion yen (S$2.85 billion) for the January-March period.
The result comes after chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto in February declared the tech investment company – long known for volatile earnings and outsized bets on technology start-ups – was on a return to a “growth trajectory”.
Although founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son has for years talked about the potential for artificial intelligence (AI), as well as robotics, SoftBank has not been a big player in the kind of generative AI models like ChatGPT that have caught the imagination of the public, and investors.
But the promise of an AI-driven future has bolstered the valuation of SoftBank’s crown jewel asset, British chip design firm Arm Holdings.
Monday’s result marks the second straight quarter of profit for SoftBank, although for the full year the company remained in the red.
The Vision Fund investment unit booked an investment loss of 57.5 billion yen, after three consecutive quarters of profit
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Fourth-quarter net profit at group level compared with a 32 billion yen loss in the same period a year earlier, when capital raised using SoftBank’s stake in Alibaba Group cushioned some of the writedowns in the value of Vision Fund private portfolio companies. REUTERS
