Son pulls a rabbit out of his telecom hat
Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group stunned the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street by posting a €3.27 billion quarterly profit, fuelled by telecom holdings and a rare bout of investment luck.
The Japanese tech conglomerate said on 13 May it had a net profit of ¥517.2 billion (€3.06 billion) for its fiscal fourth quarter, up from ¥231 billion (€1.36 billion) a year ago. That result trashed LSEG analyst guesses, which had gloomily pencilled in a ¥26.9 billion (€159 million) loss.
SoftBank’s numbers are about as stable as a drunken cat. This quarterly win nudged the company to its first annual profit in four years, clocking a full-year gain of ¥1.2 trillion (€7.1 billion).
Astris Advisory, SoftBank analyst Kirk Boodry said, “It’s a surprise . . . but in the bigger scheme of things what really matters is their plans for Stargate and OpenAI.”
Boodry put the shock result down to T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Alibaba shares, and a few lucky punts in private companies suddenly not looking like total disasters.
SoftBank’s victory lap comes as it splashes €28 billion on OpenAI and gears up to fire €93.5 billion into its Stargate AI infrastructure scheme. Stargate plans a mega-buildout of data centres across the US, funded with project financing and involving a mishmash of partners like Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia.
It is all part of Son’s AI masterplan, where he imagines artificial intelligence will soon trigger a new economic and social upheaval. Whether it’s the good kind remains up for debate.
The group also bragged about a ¥177 billion (€1.05 billion) investment gain in its Vision Funds, a tech-heavy gamble that was dragged up by Coupang and TikTok owner ByteDance. Just last quarter, Vision Funds posted a grim ¥352 billion (€2.08 billion) loss, proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
SoftBank rounded things off by saying it would chuck all its robotics companies into one basket. No word yet on whether that will make them sink faster or slower.
