SoftBank Reports Historic ¥5 Trillion Profit, but a Funding Pullback Reveals Creeping Caution

When Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group unveils a net profit that dwarfs anything a Japanese company has ever delivered, the natural instinct is to celebrate. Yet beneath the headline number lies a more nuanced picture. The ¥5.002 trillion ($32 billion) annual surplus — more than quadruple the prior year’s figure — was powered almost entirely by OpenAI’s soaring valuation. At the same time, SoftBank is quietly scaling back a planned margin loan linked to that same investment, a move that suggests even the most ardent AI bull is tempering his bet.

The fourth quarter alone delivered ¥1.83 trillion ($11.6 billion), marking the fifth consecutive profitable quarter. Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto called it the largest yearly profit ever recorded by a Japanese corporation. The engine was the Vision Fund, which booked ¥3.1 trillion in investment gains for the quarter, driven overwhelmingly by its OpenAI stake. SoftBank’s holding in the ChatGPT developer was valued at roughly $79.6 billion at the end of March 2026, with cumulative gains exceeding $45 billion.

But the financing behind that stake is getting a rethink. SoftBank has already committed to a further $30 billion investment in OpenAI during 2026, which would bring its total commitment to $64.6 billion and imply a roughly 13% ownership. In March, the group arranged a $40 billion bridge loan, of which $20 billion was drawn in April. After repaying $2.5 billion, roughly $17.5 billion remains outstanding. Now reports indicate SoftBank is slashing the size of a separate planned OpenAI margin loan by several billion dollars — a clear sign of defensive positioning after the stock’s recent wild swings.

The broader portfolio provided mixed support. The 90% stake in chip designer Arm Holdings benefited from a 38% share price jump during the March quarter. Yet Arm’s own earnings released earlier this week showed a healthy 20% revenue rise to $1.49 billion, but CEO Rene Haas flagged weakness in the smartphone market. License revenue, a high-margin stream, came in at $671 million, missing analyst expectations and tempering some of the AI enthusiasm.

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Other positions also contributed. SoftBank booked a ¥278.6 billion gain from its Intel holding. It sold Nvidia shares at a profit and collected proceeds from the PayPay initial public offering. Not everything went right: Coupang, DiDi and Klarna weighed on results, and the ¥7.799 trillion in group revenue represented only a 7.7% increase.

On the more stable side, the domestic telecom unit SoftBank Corp. closed the fiscal year with record revenue and net profit, beating its own medium-term targets. The group has earmarked $38.5 billion in investments for the new fiscal year starting April 2026. Its loan-to-value ratio stood at a comfortable 20.6%.

Nevertheless, the debt side of the story is drawing increasing scrutiny. S&P Global Ratings downgraded its outlook on SoftBank to “negative” in March, citing the leveraged financing behind the OpenAI pledge. Financing costs in the final quarter jumped to ¥229.4 billion from ¥148.9 billion a year earlier. Son is already talking up the next wave: a robotics project called Roze and possible data-center investments in France. But with the group’s fortunes tied so tightly to OpenAI and Arm, the question is whether this historic profit marks the start of a new trajectory or simply a fleeting window of favorable valuations.