Japan’s SoftBank returns to earnings after gains at imagination fund and other investments

TOKYO — Japanese technology throng SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its imagination fund investments.

Tokyo-based SoftBank throng Corp. reported Tuesday a budgetary second quarter earnings of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen deficit in the year-earlier period.

Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).

SoftBank credited returns from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing business, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, customer electronic devices, and AI applications.

The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s property in office-space sharing enterprise WeWork, which hit the previous budgetary year.

WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 insolvency protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.

SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising distribute prices in some property, such as U.S.-based e-commerce business Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.

SoftBank’s budgetary results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling property financing collection that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence business Nvidia.

SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of imagination Funds.

The business’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology property in Japan. SoftBank throng does not provide returns forecasts.

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Yuri Kageyama is on X: https://x.com/yurikageyama