For many tech companies, the past 12 months have been a roller coaster ride, from a pandemic-induced market-wide sell-off in March to one of the largest stock market launches in history. However, this has been an especially wild ride for Japanese SoftBank, which manages the world’s largest tech mutual fund.
In an earnings report released Monday, SoftBank posted a profit of more than $ 11 billion in changes in its share prices over the past year for the three months ended December.
The result was a far cry from SoftBank’s position at the same time last year. Then the company found itself in the midst of an epic slide that resulted in the declaration of more than $ 12 billion in annual operating loss following investment losses at companies hard hit by the pandemic.
But what the market takes away, it can also give back. By the summer, SoftBank had miraculously rebounded thanks to sales of tens of billions of dollars in assets and a hot stock market.
Since then the market has gotten even hotter. In December, SoftBank’s investments in DoorDash and biotech company Seer soared in value, among other things, as investors piled up in a broader frenzy for selling new shares in companies’ IPOs. A market rally in Uber stocks is also an important profit factor for SoftBank this quarter.
In a triumphant profit conference, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son compared his company to the goose that laid the golden egg. In February last year, the media said the company was laying “bad eggs,” Son said. But that earnings report proved the skeptics wrong, he argued.
“We have a turbo-charged strategy to turn white eggs into golden eggs,” he said, adding, “These golden eggs are not laid randomly, but according to plan.”
So far, investors seemed to be in agreement. After falling steeply this summer, SoftBank’s share price has risen. The stock traded at yen 9,485, or about $ 90 per share per share in Tokyo on Monday, nearing its highs in early 2000, just before the collapse of the first internet stock bubble.
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