In what he claimed was his last presentation to investors in November, Masayoshi Son lamented that his entrepreneurial knack would be wasted as SoftBank shifted to a full defensive mode to cut losses. To avoid that, he pledged to devote himself entirely to growing Arm, the UK chip designer owned by the Japanese technology group.Four months on, it’s not exactly clear to the outside world what the 65-year-old founder is up to. For the first time in decades, and being true to his word, Son did not appear on stage last week as SoftBank revealed fresh investment losses of $5.5bn for the latest quarter.
What was clear, though, to investors, was just how much the future of SoftBank, which Son dubs as “a vision capitalist”, rests on one company: Arm.
Following a historic selldown in Alibaba, an investment on which Son built his name as one of the world’s greatest technology visionaries, Arm now accounts for a bigger percentage of SoftBank’s net asset value than the Chinese ecommerce group. At 16 per cent, Arm is also bigger than the 13 per cent share of the overall NAV for SoftBank’s domestic mobile business.