Minato City: Shares of SoftBank Group plunged nearly 19 percent on Monday amid a global market sell-off, erasing billions from founder Masayoshi Son's fortune. The Japanese tech giant, known for its substantial investments through its Vision Fund, has seen its shares decline since last Thursday when Japanese equities began to drop following the Bank of Japan's interest rate hike.
On Monday alone, Son's net worth decreased by 4.6 billion dollars, according to the Forbes real-time billionaires list. The Nikkei 225 also suffered a significant loss of 12.4 percent, marking its worst day since the 1987 "Black Monday."
Despite a strong performance earlier this year, where SoftBank's stock reached new highs driven by the Vision Fund's recovery and a surge in the share price of Arm, a British chip designer 90 percent owned by SoftBank, Monday's drop has left SoftBank’s shares only 1.7 percent higher for the year.
Investors are now looking ahead to SoftBank's fiscal first-quarter earnings report due this Wednesday, hoping to see continued recovery in the Vision Fund. Son, who had been out of the public eye for some time, reappeared in June to share his vision for the future of artificial intelligence, predicting it will eventually be 10,000 times smarter than humans.
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