4 ms·
there's reason to believe SoftBank is gonna go "boom", and in a big way: - they have tons of illiquid assets (equity in startups and early stage companies - ha
by maximente 7y ago
there's reason to believe SoftBank is gonna go "boom", and in a big way:
- they have tons of illiquid assets (equity in startups and early stage companies - hard to shed - see later)
- SoftBank Vision Fund "borrows" from its huge illiquid assets (Uber + other SV stuff) in order to make the market by throwing around insane amounts of cash ($billions); in other words, they make their own markets in order to pump up their valuations but the underlying thing is fantasy-land VC goop (see any problems here?);
- the only way to shed many of these assets are with buyouts or IPOs and the most recent ones haven't been great (the 'big names' of which [UBER, LYFT] were treated like hot garbage even shorted by IPO underwriters in case of UBER) so it's not like this garbage can be punted to someone else
- SoftBank routinely sells assets to its Vision Fund and uses shady stuff like this in order to provide non-standard accounting; we have no idea what their financial health is due to a maze of non-standard reporting
- SoftBank owns over half (!!) of Japanese corporate bonds
- they have insane amounts of debt - "¥15.7tn ($143bn) of interest-bearing debt and ¥27tn of total liabilities, far greater than its ¥11.6tn market capitalisation"
as best i can tell this is approaching Ponzi territory. once more greater fools wake up to the fact that VC isn't all the rage, get the hell out of the way of anything that SoftBank touches.
- neural_thing 7y agoI don't think softbank owns half of Japanese corporate bonds. It may be that its bonds account for over half the market.
- whatok 7y agoIt's neither. They account for half of the retail JPY corparate market. Much different and smaller market than overall (institutional) corporate market. Half of JPY corporate markets is an astronomical number that doesn't pass a basic sniff test. https://www.ft.com/content/24c4a8a8-7885-11e9-bbad-7c18c0ea0201 https://www.ft.com/content/24c4a8a8-7885-11e9-bbad-7c18c0ea0...
- thewarrior 7y agoI have a conspiracy theory kicking around in my head that Softbank might be a money laundering or tax saving scam of some sort. Why else would you invest 300 million in a dog walking app ?
- gomox 7y agoIt's a pretty standard interpretation that the Softbank funds are a vehicle to deploy capital that is otherwise hard to invest (because of political controversy, dubious origins, etc). That's why they can afford to throw cash around so liberally.
- thewarrior 7y agoSo startups are like the art market now ...
- oarabbus_ 7y agoAside from the corporate bonds, how do these points differ much from other similar megacorps or investment banks?
- whatok 7y agoNeither acts as a VC fund that is forced to overpay for things since it has too much capital to deploy.