SoftBank suffers third straight loss despite recovery in flagship fund unit

Receive free SoftBank Group Corp updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest SoftBank Group Corp news every morning.

SoftBank Group spent a third straight quarter in the red, recording a ¥477.6bn ($3.3bn) loss for the quarter ending in June despite a recovery at its flagship Vision Fund investment unit.

The quarterly loss came despite analyst predictions of the group returning to profit after SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son told shareholders in June the company was “going on the counteroffensive”.

Based on an average of four analysts surveyed by Refinitiv ahead of Tuesday’s results, the market had expected SoftBank to make a ¥75bn group-wide profit in the first quarter of the financial year that began in April. But the group sustained losses partly as a result of share price declines at Alibaba, Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile.

Although SoftBank’s April to June loss was heavier than expected, it was significantly better than SoftBank’s performance in the same quarter a year earlier, when it made a loss of ¥3.16tn.

The depth of SoftBank’s losses were partially offset by an improvement at the Vision Fund unit, which booked an investment gain of ¥159.77bn due to a recovery in global tech valuations. The gains included those attributable to subsidiaries of SoftBank.

Son is planning to float UK chip designer Arm in the US later this year and analysts believe he may seek a valuation for the company of as much as $60bn.

Before the April to June period, the Vision Fund had logged five consecutive quarters of losses, battered by the sharp plunge in global tech valuations.

The Vision Fund segment, which includes Vision Funds 1 and 2 as well as the $7.6bn LatAm Funds, recorded a pre-tax profit of ¥61bn for the most recent quarter, against a ¥2.3tn loss in the same period a year earlier.