SoftBank's Vision Fund posted a record ¥4.3 trillion loss after its buying binge

Through 2019–2021, SoftBank's Vision Fund 1 and Vision Fund 2 wrote enormous checks into late-stage private technology companies at rich valuations, deploying capital far faster than any comparable fund — $15.6 billion in a single quarter of fiscal 2021 alone. The strategy assumed the winners would go public at even higher valuations, funded partly by SoftBank's own borrowing against its Alibaba stake.

In fiscal year 2022 (April 2022 to March 2023), the Vision Fund segment posted an investment loss of ¥4.3 trillion (about $32 billion), the fund's worst annual result on record and roughly double the prior year's ¥2.55 trillion loss. SoftBank Group's overall net loss for the year was ¥970.1 billion (about $7.2 billion) — narrower than the group's prior-year record net loss of ¥1.7 trillion, because gains elsewhere in the group partly offset the fund's markdowns. By the December 2022 quarter, the fund had posted four consecutive quarterly losses.

The pullback in new investment was just as steep as the write-downs: after deploying $15.6 billion in a single quarter of fiscal 2021, the Vision Fund segment invested only $400 million in the December 2022 quarter and about $1 billion across the three quarters combined. Son told shareholders the company had gone into 'defense mode,' holding roughly $35 billion in cash and prioritizing exits over new bets, a posture he said publicly in June 2023 he was ready to leave behind.