SoftBank Group sold nearly $14 billion in shares of listed companies in the second quarter of this year, nearly three times what it sold in The first quarter, in which the company is increasing the pace of investment in technology startups.
The company may have raised more than $6 billion from liquidating its contributions to Facebook, Microsoft, Alphabet, Salesforce and Netflix in the three months ending 30 June, according to Bloomberg calculations, and based on data disclosed by SoftBank in its quarterly reports with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which Al-Arabiya.net reviewed.
The figures show that about $4 billion more came from partial sales of its stakes in Uber Technologies and DoorDash.
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son's new approach, known for his reluctance to make money from investments, is signaling a new appetite for exit to fund the accelerating pace of dealmaking in his investment arm Vision Fund. Fund, in which the company poured $15 billion into private startups in the last quarter alone, about half of which came from proceeds from stock sales.
Sun has also doubled the size of the Vision 2 fund, in which SoftBank is investing alone, to $40 billion since the end of March.
SoftBank disclosed the number of shares it sold each company without specifically disclosing how much it received in return for those sales. Bloomberg estimated the money it made by multiplying the number of shares sold by the average price per share during the quarter.
SB Northstar, a subsidiary of SoftBank created to trade public equity and derivatives, has sold 2.4 million shares of PayPal, and 4.4 million shares of Taiwan's TSMC - the world's largest semiconductor maker - and about 367,000 shares of Amazon, valued at about $2.37 billion.
The subsidiary is shrinking its portfolio, as total holdings of highly liquid securities have fallen to $13.6 billion as of June, from $22 billion at the end of 2020.
Separately, Vision Fund disposed approximately 5.6 million shares in Guardant Health, a California-based biotechnology company, and 23.4 million shares from the Chinese real estate platform Online KE Holdings.
