Swiggy, Ola Electric, FirstCry Dent SoftBank's India Returns
SoftBank's India portfolio includes companies like Zomato-owned Blinkit, Delhivery, Flipkart, Paytm and Policybazaar.
Investments in Indian companies like Swiggy Ltd., Brainbees Solutions Ltd. and Ola Electric Mobility Ltd. have dented Japan-based SoftBank Group Corp.'s returns from the country's secondary market.
SoftBank, which is invested in India through its SoftBank Vision Funds, holds listed Indian companies like Ola Electric, Swiggy, FirstCry, Paytm and PolicyBazaar.
The Tokyo-based firm said that its Vision Funds were pressured by performance of listed stocks it was invested in.
"The contribution of Vision Fund 1 was very large," Executive Managing Director Yoshimitsu Goto said in a post-earnings call on Tuesday. "It was a bit disappointing with Vision Fund 2, as the impact of listed stocks was large."
For SVF1, one of the company's funds, it saw a fair value increase of 4.1% in value of investments on a sequential basis. But for public portfolio companies in this fund, the quarterly increase was only 0.8%, which was partially due to "declines in FirstCry and other investments".
The other fund — SVF2 — saw the fair value of its investments fall 2.7% in the quarter. In this fund, for publicly traded companies, the value was down 21.7% on a sequential basis, "mainly due to share price declines in Swiggy and Ola Electric Mobility", SoftBank said.
Shares of FirstCry fell 23% in the quarter ended March, Swiggy fell 21% and Ola Electric declined nearly 30%.
Goto said that while publicly listed stocks have fallen considerably, the drop in stocks listed in India, which was a particularly strong market, was a "bit large". He added that the company would continue to closely monitor any future recovery.
SoftBank's India portfolio includes companies like Zomato-owned Blinkit, Delhivery, Flipkart, Paytm and Policybazaar.
Bloomberg News had earlier reported that SoftBank-backed Oyo Hotels had delayed plans for an October IPO after opposition from the former.
For the fourth quarter, SoftBank reported a net income of ¥517 billion, or about $3.5 billion, supported by valuations of tech startups like ByteDance Ltd.
