For a company often hailed for its forward thinking and for the big bets it places on future business trends, Softbank seems at times to be terribly accident-prone.
The much-heralded tech investor, best known in Britain for its takeover of the chip designer ARM Holdings shortly after the Brexit vote, blundered two years ago with a huge bet on the shared office provider WeWork.
It reported a loss of £5bn in the three months to the end of September 2019 after writing down the value of its investment in the company by $3.4bn, which dragged into a loss the Vision Fund, the giant Saudi-backed investment vehicle through which it has backed businesses such as Uber.
That brought a public apology from Masayoshi Son, Softbank’s founder and chief executive, who is generally regarded as the world’s most influential tech investor.
Today, almost exactly two years on, Mr Son was again explaining a torrent of red ink all over the accounts.
Softbank reported a net loss of ¥397.9bn (£2.6bn) after the Vision Fund reported a quarterly loss of ¥825.1bn (£5.4bn) – the biggest quarterly loss of its history and its first quarterly loss since the first three months of last year.
Once again, the loss reflected write-downs in the value of assets, to the tune of almost £40bn.
This time, though, the write-downs were in China rather than the United States.
Softbank appears to have fallen foul of the crackdown on tech companies and tech entrepreneurs launched earlier this year by the Chinese government.
Particularly damaging in this regard was Didi, the Chinese ride-hailing app, which plunged in value just days after its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange after Beijing ordered it to stop registering new drivers and users for its app. Softbank now…
Source : skynews
