SoftBank Group Reports Lower Quarterly Profit

By Kosaku Narioka

SoftBank Group's first-quarter net profit dropped due to lower gains from its Vision Funds business.

The Japanese technology investment company said Thursday that net profit fell 18% from a year earlier to 347.33 billion yen, equivalent to $2.20 billion, for the three months ended June. That still beat the estimate of Y125.9 billion from a poll of analysts by data provider Visible Alpha.

Its Vision Funds business booked profit of Y5.43 billion, sharply lower compared with the Y451.39 billion in profit in the same period a year earlier.

The Tokyo-based company recorded a gain of $25 billion in the January-March quarter from its stake in OpenAI, the maker of the widely used artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.

SoftBank said the valuation of its stake in OpenAI hasn't changed since the end of March. It added that its Vision Fund 2 plans to borrow $10.0 billion against its OpenAI shares this month.

The Japanese technology investment company has made several large investments in OpenAI and plans to make another $10 billion investment in October. That would bring SoftBank's total investment in OpenAI to $64.6 billion, representing a stake of about 13%.

Investors are keenly watching Softbank Group given concerns about intense fundraising by companies for capital expenditure on AI as well as worries over whether these efforts will create a blockbuster engine for profits in the future.

In late May, SoftBank Group unveiled a $52 billion data-center plan in France to tap the country's nuclear-driven power surplus and diversify its data-center footprint outside the U.S. and Japan.

Last week, Softbank unit Arm Holdings posted higher fiscal first-quarter net profit as demand for its chip designs continued to grow across AI infrastructure and data centers.

Write to Kosaku Narioka at kosaku.narioka@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 06, 2026 03:42 ET (07:42 GMT)