Son Jeong-ui Reappears... Draws Sword at Vision Fund

Layoffs May Begin This Week
13-30% of All Employees Targeted

Masayoshi Son, chairman of Japan's SoftBank, who appeared in public for the first time in seven months, immediately drew the 'restructuring' sword. The plan is to cut up to 30% of the workforce in the Vision Fund division, which is suffering massive investment losses.

On the 21st (local time), Bloomberg News reported, citing sources, that SoftBank will begin layoff procedures in the Vision Fund division as early as this week.

According to sources, the workforce affected by this reduction is expected to be about 13-30% of the total employees in overseas divisions including the United States. As of the end of Q1 this year, the total workforce of the Vision Fund division was 349, and 52-105 employees are expected to be laid off in this reduction.

SoftBank has initiated a second round of layoffs nine months after cutting 150 jobs in the Vision Fund and SoftBank International in September last year.

Bloomberg described, "This workforce reduction is due to the Vision Fund posting massive losses for five consecutive quarters amid a sharp decline in tech stocks." SoftBank, which has aggressively invested mainly in tech stocks such as China's ByteDance and Alibaba, has continued to suffer losses as the value of its invested companies plummeted due to high-intensity tightening since last year and the shockwaves from the US-China conflict.

As a result, SoftBank's Vision Fund recorded the largest annual net loss in history last year. SoftBank announced on the 11th of last month that the Vision Fund posted a net loss of 5.3223 trillion yen (approximately 52.45 trillion KRW) for the 2022 fiscal year (April last year to March this year). This figure is significantly higher compared to the previous year's loss of 362.6 billion yen and is the largest loss since the establishment of the Vision Fund. Having recorded large-scale losses for two consecutive years, SoftBank has halted new investments and proceeded with asset sales to overcome management difficulties.

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Chairman Son, who had been out of the public eye since November last year, broke his seven-month silence and appeared at an official event on this day. Appearing at the SoftBank shareholders' meeting held in Tokyo, Japan, Son admitted, "I made wrong investments." He then tried to soothe investors by saying, "Thanks to taking a defensive stance over the past three years, we increased our cash holdings to 5 trillion yen."

He announced that he would shift to an aggressive investment mode targeting the currently hottest artificial intelligence (AI) market. Son emphasized, "A huge (AI technology) revolution is coming. We will not collapse due to short-term losses," and added, "We will ultimately be in a position to dominate this revolution."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.