Operating profit for the final quarter of 2018 jumped 60% from a year earlier to 438 billion yen ($4 billion), SoftBank (SFTBF) said Wednesday. A big chunk of that came from a surge in income from the Japanese company's huge tech fund, which benefited from the rising value of investments in Uber and WeWork.
Son is a billionaire entrepreneur who started SoftBank as a software distributor in Japan nearly 40 years ago and built it into one of the biggest players in the global tech industry. In 2017, he launched the Saudi-backed SoftBank Vision Fund, which has pumped more than $45 billion into tech companies around the world and has more than $50 billion still to spend.
The Vision Fund's aggressive moves — it has now invested in more than 70 companies — have shaken up the tech industry and made Son into one of its kingmakers.
While some of the fund's high-profile investments have boosted SoftBank's profits, at least one has hurt them.
The company said Wednesday that a sharp drop in the value of its stake in US chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA), whose shares plunged toward the end of 2018, cost it 117 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in the last three months of the year — even after accounting for steps SoftBank took to hedge the risk.
SoftBank said the Vision Fund has offloaded its entire stake in Nvidia since the start of this year.
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