SoftBank Vision Fund Yearly Loss Widens To $32 Billion on Startups Valuation Cut (techcrunch.com) 14
SoftBank Vision Fund lost $32 billion in the financial year ending March as the Japanese investment giant, the most prolific global investor in tech startups, continues to suffer from valuation corrections across its portfolio of private and public tech companies amid a weakening global economy. From a report: The loss surged about 70% from the same period a year prior, when SoftBank had reported $19 billion in losses at the Vision Fund unit. The losses come even as SoftBank has grown very cautious about deploying new capital to startups in recent quarters. Among the losses, the Japanese conglomerate said its Vision Fund 1 made an unrealized loss of $1.6 billion each in SenseTime Group and GoTo and nearly $800 million in DoorDash. The fair value of SoftBank's portfolio was marked down over the quarter by $2.3 billion to $138 billion.
Give me half instead (Score:2)
I could have easily turned 16 billion into .... 16 billion by doing nothing.
Back in the day SoftBank used to be the elite go to super smart can do no wrong VC everyone wanted on their board. Now we know it was just the craziness of the times and they looked like winner because every stupid little startup was sold to some mega corp for a zillion bucks based on mega corp FOMO.
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I was joking about getting 16b, obviously that would never happen in any universe.
You make a good point about their loss being a fake loss based on fake valuations. The article doesn't clarify if this is real or fake money but I think you're probably right, it's fake valuation money.
We had a sloshy problem in 99-2001 for the sitcom era which wasn't a period of QE. There are various eras and reasons for the slosh, QE is just one of them.
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They're a VC firm that owns chip designer ARM.
What bumbling head managment means for T-Head and SiFive, not sure.
Cory thinks SoftBank is built to fail (Score:2)
In "Checkpoint Capitalism," Cory Doctorow & coauthor comment briefly about the Saudi investment in SoftBank. Here is CNN coverage from 2018: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/15... [cnn.com]. According to the book, this is an example of investing in companies that will not be financially successful for years, if ever. The goal of companies like Uber and Doordash is to become a monopoly (or monopsony or oligopoly or all) so they can buy or ruin the competition, and then raise prices, lock in sellers/suppliers, and avoid
SoftBank short ETF anyone? (Score:2)
Someone needs to create an ETF that shorts anything SoftBank invests in. Like the SJIM ETF that shorts anything Jim Cramer promotes.
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You can just short Softbank itself. However its market cap is way below the value of its assets so I would be cautious shorting that.
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For as much as I like to hammer Cramer for his comment back in 2007/2008 (forget which year) when he said the government has to do something re: the impending market collapse, thus showing he's not a true free marketist, his decades of experience would be something difficult to bet against. Sure, many of his picks are wrong, but enough are right to still make money. B
Re: SoftBank short ETF anyone? (Score:2)
The LJIM ETF that bets with Cramer isn't performing well either. I think the reality is neither ETF has been going for long enough yet to know how well they'll perform over time.
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well, that would be a nice scheme.
Haven't seen many ETF projects that make sense; this could be an exception.
Seriously, a great idea...
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