SoftBank Group Corp has finally risen from a long slumber and made investments in Amazon, Netflix, Tesla, Alphabet and many more, regulatory filings show. According to these filings, the company has built a stake worth around $1.2 billion in Amazon alone, showing how serious the company is about making a comeback.
SoftBank saw one of its worst financial years in 2019-2020, with many of its investments failing. This, paired with the disaster that was the Vision fund, led to the company reaching a precarious position, with CEO Masayoshi Son selling his own assets just to keep the conglomerate afloat. However, the billionaire announced a new investment management subsidiary to the company, which will invest money from this “massive asset sale programme” into liquid stocks.
And who better to buy stocks from than Amazon? The company’s shares have risen 73% in value in 2020, with Jeff Bezos parting away with 1 million of them just a few days ago, which netted him a total of $3.1 billion.
Moreover, the company also invested in companies like Tesla, Netflix, Alphabet etc., all of which are established giants in their respective fields. It has also made investments in Chinese companies like Bilibili Inc and iQIYI Inc, which might not sit well with America, as iQIYI Inc is being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission at the moment.
This approach of investing in profit generating, well established companies, is in contrast to the ‘vision’ of the $100 billion Vision Fund, which had its focus set on early stage startups. However, seeing how the fund failed massively, one can’t raise too many fingers at SoftBank.
Moreover, the conglomerate has also invested $220 million in Nvidia Corp, a company it exited from last year. This is backed by the fact the Nvidia overtook Intel to become the largest chip manufacturer in the world.
Overall, the filings suggest that SoftBank has spent around $10 billion buying shares.
