We all know the failures - are there any major success in their portfolio? Or is it all meh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son
> s of October 2021, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Son's net worth at US$23.1 billion, making him the second richest man in Japan and 68th richest person in the world,[1] despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[4]
After that the big success came with investment in Ali Baba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group
> In October 1999, SoftBank became a holding company.[21] In 2000, SoftBank made its most successful investment – $20 million to a then-fledgling Chinese Internet venture called Alibaba.[22] This investment turned into $60 billion when Alibaba went public in September 2014.[23][24]
ByteDance, Grab, Ola, Uber, Opendoor, Slack, DoorDash, Didi, Coupang were/are all great bets.
According to CrunchBase (https://news.crunchbase.com/news/softbank-vision-fund-strate...), as of March 31, 2021 Vision Fund 1 was worth $146.5 billion from $86.2 billion in initial investment. I don't know enough about the space to judge whether that is considered good enough or not.
Also Crunchbase is imperfect data so those numbers could be WAY off for all we know.
But consider how big they are, probably not too bad?
Take a look at these comical slides from Softbank back when they took over WeWork after it collapsed: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/the-best-slides-from-softba...
If we talk news worthy stuff, ByteDance could be the biggest name on that list ?
This just seems like many of Softbank's acquisitions where they went in to the deal with a really weird strategy for success and then 5 years later it turns out they aren't smarter than everyone else in the room. It's also not like ARM was some early stage start up at that point, they weren't taking some long bet knowing it had high risk.
how a vast company with all the funding in the world can "bet on iot" but fail so miserably to make any improvement or change at all for so long is something i don't think I'll ever understand.
dont get me started on how impossible to purchase most chips are, how inaccessible/non-existant the docs are, how vendored the frak up the screwball drivers are. what a devolved old world 80's style trashfire of computing arm has been.
open source is finally building up real traction bringing light to this dark mushroom hole, Google is too exhausted & the public opinion wearing thin from unsupportable shortlived high tech devices, but what a slow slow painful march it's been dragging arm & such a broken industry into a respectable place.
amusingly the critics are saying that a7 isnt the right choice, but are citing an equally aged, unmoving set of microcontrollers as what should be used. these chips at least uaually have docs, i feel like.
personally i think decent low power application processors are as much if not more of the challenge than microcontrollers to iot's developmemt. everything is a smart speaker, smart camera, has screens. watches run apps, clocks run apps. arm failing this industry miserably is quite the story. but yes, datacenters & the cloud are eattinf the world. tech is innovating ul, to bigger & bigger more expensive offerings, & the cut-throat consumer tech offerings are dying. it's a market intel bounced out of, amd commands a huge price in, and which sees nearly no wins. m3/m4+a7 forever and ever; maybe someday risc-v will shake things up.
Son did not push anyone, ARM was IoT crazy before it was purchased: http://web.archive.org/web/20151006082751/http://www.arm.com...
Makes you wonder if the work you're doing is at all productive or really is not.
Failure to sell to Nvidia at 2X the acquisition price is not a failure, it was an honest attempt to make a profit.
ARM is just not the right company to make that happen. They are fantastic at what they do but not software services, big data, etc
Dude bought ARM at 31bn and was going to flip it for 66bn until anti-trust regulators intervened.
SoftBank did nothing wrong, other than accept the risk of regulatory intervention.
Sure, the valuation went from 33 to 66bn, but could've done a lot better. Just because you made money doesn't mean you didn't do something stupid.
Also, competing in server market is very very hard. If they had exclusively focused only on server market for past 5 years, they probably might still have been just minor player because of massive Intel legacy that needs to be overcome but no one knows how.
