SoftBank has sold roughly $7.2 billion worth of shares in
the Chinese ecommerce giant via prepaid forward contracts, according to an
analysis of the corporate filings by The Financial Times, published on Wednesday.
Because of the sales, the report noted that SoftBank will now only maintain a
3.8% stake in Alibaba, which has a market cap over nearly $250 billion.
It was only about three years ago that SoftBank maintained a
nearly 25% stake in the tech giant worth over $100 billion. At the time,
Alibaba was SoftBank's most valuable investment.
But over the years, SoftBank and its Vision Fund have been
posting huge quarterly losses amid a slowdown in the tech sector that has
hammered valuations. In February, the Vision Fund posted a pretax loss of 660
billion Japanese yen (or about $5 billion), marking the unit's fourth
consecutive quarterly loss.
At the time, Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of the
Japanese technology conglomerate and holding company, said SoftBank would
operate in a "defense" mode and be more "conservative."
Son invested $20 million in Alibaba in 2000, helping the
e-commerce startup grow into one of the world's biggest tech companies.
In March, Alibaba said it would split into six business
groups, with each unit able to receive its own funding and potentially go
public. The move was "designed to unlock shareholder value and foster
market competitiveness," Alibaba said in a statement.
In 2020, Son stepped down from Alibaba's board, shortly
after Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma resigned from SoftBank's board.
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