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SoftBank Group's Quarterly Profit Falls Nearly 18% Despite 282% Jump in Investment Gains

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SoftBank Group's Quarterly Profit Falls Nearly 18% Despite 282% Jump in Investment Gains

SoftBank Group (TYO:9984) reported a 17.7% year-over-year drop in attributable profit in the fiscal first quarter ended June 30 despite a surge in investment gains, including from Intel.

Profit attributable to shareholders slumped to 347.3 billion yen from 421.8 billion yen a year earlier. Earnings per share slipped to 59.85 yen from 72.82 yen, according to its financial statement published Thursday.

Net sales rose 10.9% to 2.02 trillion yen from 1.82 trillion yen last year, boosted by increased sales at its SoftBank mobile and broadband services unit and at its AI Computing segment.

Meanwhile, the drop in profit came despite total investment gains nearly quadrupling to 1.859 trillion yen from 486.9 billion yen. The Investment Business of Holding Companies segment booked a 1.382 trillion yen gain, almost entirely from a 1.333 trillion yen gain on Intel shares after the chipmaker's stock price jumped to $139.63 as of the June quarter from $44.13 in the March quarter.

Gains at SoftBank Vision Funds fell 30.3% to 460.1 billion yen, as a strong ByteDance-driven gain of $2.2 billion was offset by losses at its Vision Fund 2 related to declines in the share prices of PayPay and Symbotic.

SoftBank's investment gains were offset by a 69.7% jump in selling, general and administrative expenses to 1.287 trillion yen on higher share-based compensation, particularly for Arm engineers, and its acquisition of semiconductor design firm Ampere.

SoftBank also continued investing in OpenAI, making a $10 billion follow-on investment as part of its $30 billion comittment announced in February, bringing total investment in the ChatGPT developer to $44.6 billion.

SoftBank does not provide earnings forecasts, citing the difficulty of predicting results due to "numerous uncertainties affecting earnings."

The company maintained its dividend forecast of 11 yen per share for the full fiscal year ending March 31, 2027.

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