Additional Investment Announced Last Month
Total Investment Rises to 2.9 Trillion Won
3.5 Trillion Won Loss in Q4 Last Year
"Impact of Vision Fund Losses"
On February 12, SoftBank Group of Japan announced that it had made an additional investment of $1.5 billion (approximately 2.2 trillion won) last month in OpenAI, the developer of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform ChatGPT.
As a result, SoftBank Group’s total investment in OpenAI has increased to $2 billion (approximately 2.9 trillion won). Yoshimitsu Goto, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of SoftBank Group, commented during the company’s earnings briefing for the April-December 2024 period, but declined to address reports that SoftBank Group would invest tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI in the future, saying, “I will refrain from commenting.”
He stated, “When comparing monthly website visits, OpenAI is overwhelmingly ahead of other services,” and added, “Given such a wide gap, it is expected that it will take time for competitors to catch up.” He continued, “Because OpenAI enjoys such strong support, if we consider which company we should partner with now, the answer is clearly OpenAI, without hesitation.”
Regarding the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, he said, “The continuous emergence of new services is something the AI industry should welcome,” but added, “We will take some time to observe how it will be evaluated.”
Previously, SoftBank Group and OpenAI announced their plans to establish a joint venture in Japan to develop and sell enterprise generative AI. The two companies, together with American software company Oracle, plan to invest at least $500 billion (approximately 727 trillion won) to establish a new AI company called ‘Stargate.’
Meanwhile, SoftBank Group announced on the same day that it recorded a loss of 369.1 billion yen (approximately 3.5 trillion won) in the fourth quarter of last year. In the third quarter, the company posted a profit of 1.1796 trillion yen (approximately 11.2 trillion won), but returned to a loss after just one quarter. Nikkei reported that the loss was influenced by a deficit of 352.7 billion yen (approximately 3.3 trillion won) in the Vision Fund business, SoftBank’s investment fund. The report added that the main factors were declines in the share prices and valuations of Coupang in South Korea and Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing app, both of which are Vision Fund portfolio companies.
However, SoftBank Group posted a profit of 636.1 billion yen (approximately 6 trillion won) for the April-December period last year. This is the first time in three years that SoftBank Group has recorded a profit for the April-December period.
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
