SoftBank's Vision Fund Writedown Can't Be the Half of It
The $5 billion quarterly decline won’t cover the WeWork debacle, and there’s plenty of other bad news.
SoftBank supremo Masayoshi Son in July, before the WeWork train wreck.
Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images AsiaPacA disastrous three months for SoftBank Group Corp. may force its Vision Fund to write down at least $5 billion for the September quarter, Bloomberg News reported. That’s not the half of it. Literally.
There are bigger, deeper, and likely unrecoverable losses ahead for the world’s largest venture-capital fund. That the devaluation of its holdings might be as low as $5 billion, possibly as high as $7 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, indicates that the Japanese company has barely scratched the surface of what losses it will need to book on its stake in WeWork, let alone the rest of its portfolio.