Tokyo (Reuters) -SoftBank Group Corp. reported a record net loss of $23 billion for the three months leading up to June on Monday. The loss was caused by trouble at its huge Vision Fund unit and a sell-off in tech stocks on the market.
The pain in the April-June quarter comes right after the closely watched Vision Fund lost a record $26 billion in May. The Vision Fund was hurt by rising interest rates and political unrest, which messed up markets around the world.
Masayoshi Son, the founder, and CEO of SoftBank, has already promised to tighten the rules for investing and keep cash on hand to get through the downturn. But the most recent results could show how willing investors are to take more big losses.
After the latest results came out on Monday, Son said at a briefing, “The world is in a lot of chaos.”
Overall, SoftBank’s falling portfolio caused it to lose $23.4 billion in the last quarter, which was its largest loss ever. At the same time last year, the company made a profit of 761.5 billion yen.
The value of the Vision Fund unit went down by $23.1 billion.
AutoStore Holdings Ltd., a company that makes robots, and SenseTime Group Inc., a company that makes artificial intelligence, are two companies whose stock prices went down.
SoftBank said it took 1.14 trillion yen off the value of its two Vision Funds’ unlisted assets. Analysts have said that writedowns of these private assets probably won’t show how bad the market is right now.
At the end of June, the second Vision Fund’s stakes in 269 companies were worth $37.2 billion, while they cost $48.2 billion to buy.
SoftBank hopes to list chip designer Arm on the stock market after a sale to Nvidia fell through because of falling IPO volumes and market skepticism about companies that lose money quickly (NASDAQ:NVDA).
SoftBank has sold off companies like ride-hailing service Uber Technologies (NYSE:UBER) and home-selling platform Opendoor Technologies (NASDAQ:OPEN), making a total of $5.6 billion.
SoftBank sold Uber at an average price of $41.47 per share, which was higher than Friday’s closing price of $32.01 per share.
SoftBank isn’t the only tech company that has lost money because of the sell-off.
Tiger Global, a hedge fund that does business with “unicorn hunter” Son, saw its flagship fund drop by 50% in the first half of the year because it didn’t realize how much rising inflation would hurt the markets.
Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKa) had a quarterly loss of $44 billion due to its investments and derivatives. CEO Warren Buffett told investors to ignore the changes.
($1 = 134.9700 yen)
