How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

dannykwells wrote: post #6

Can anyone tell me an example where Softbank has been spectacularly correct in the past few years? We all know the failures - are there any major success in their portfolio? Or is it all meh?

Pretty much a bunch of tech-illiterate people buying the latest buzzword without due diligence. Lighting money on fire. Even the successes were bought at the all time high prices (Bytedance) or mismanaged (Arm) and brought negative returns.

Take a look at these comical slides from Softbank back when they took over WeWork after it collapsed: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/the-best-slides-from-softba...

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#8

Post by TaylorPhebillo » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

dannykwells wrote: post #6

Can anyone tell me an example where Softbank has been spectacularly correct in the past few years? We all know the failures - are there any major success in their portfolio? Or is it all meh?

I honestly can't tell how the Softbank vision fund is doing. News articles on it report record breaking profits and losses. The two vision funds were recently-ish reported as being worth $150b, but I can't tell what that translates to in annualized returns, or how that looks relative to the NASDAQ.

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#9

Post by pkaye » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 2:34 AM UTC

dannykwells wrote: post #6

Can anyone tell me an example where Softbank has been spectacularly correct in the past few years? We all know the failures - are there any major success in their portfolio? Or is it all meh?

The CEO Masayoshi Son lost spectacularly during the dot com crash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son

> s of October 2021, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Son's net worth at US$23.1 billion, making him the second richest man in Japan and 68th richest person in the world,[1] despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[4]

After that the big success came with investment in Ali Baba.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group

> In October 1999, SoftBank became a holding company.[21] In 2000, SoftBank made its most successful investment – $20 million to a then-fledgling Chinese Internet venture called Alibaba.[22] This investment turned into $60 billion when Alibaba went public in September 2014.[23][24]

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#10

Post by makeitdouble » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 2:41 AM UTC

dannykwells wrote: post #6

Can anyone tell me an example where Softbank has been spectacularly correct in the past few years? We all know the failures - are there any major success in their portfolio? Or is it all meh?

Depends on what you mean "past few years", and also VisionFund is huge as has a finger in a lot of pies. https://visionfund.com/portfolio

If we talk news worthy stuff, ByteDance could be the biggest name on that list ?