The blowback from the Chinese tech crackdown has been quite tough to take for Softbank (SFTBY) because of the decision to maneuver deeply into Chinese tech shares.
It looked good at the time, as China was the center of every Wall Street analyst’s growth proposition short and long term.
However, troubles in China crystallize the massive shift of deglobalization and many investment funds are finding a new world as we turn the page.
Gone are the days when aggressive investors could just dabble in all sorts of exotic markets believing that globalized forces would be a wind at its back.
So much so that nobody ever batted an eye if you told them you had investment theses playing out in Mongolia or Brazil.
Emerging markets are blowing up and now even the passport with which you do business has never been more prominent.
Rich countries are going the way of Europe – that of intense and mind-numbing regulation to make up for a shortage of tax revenues to pay for these costly programs.
The global canary in the coal mine can be traced back to Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma effectively being muzzled by the Chinese Communist Party. This was the nail in the coffin for the China story as it relates to foreign money waterfalling in the Middle Kingdom.
That’s the end of it.
Softbank will need to go back to the drawing board and probably pluck China off the board as top dog and reset their draft board.
The pain is now being found in Softbank’s balance sheet with net profit down 40%.
Let’s look at some of Softbank’s investments which include Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA), car-share giant Didi Global (DIDI), and short-video app TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd.
Around 35%-40% of Softbank’s investments are tied up in China and its net profit is down to 761.5 billion yen, equivalent to $6.9 billion.
The incremental buyer has dried up and Softbank is now saddled with an illiquid Chinese tech portfolio they can’t get rid of.
Softbank founder Mr. Son said that SoftBank’s shares have fallen so low that the price is now only around half of the value of the company’s assets, after subtracting debt. Given that discount, SoftBank will unveil more share buybacks at some point, and is now discussing the timing and size.
He also said that SoftBank will continue the furious pace of investment at Vision Fund 2, which has stakes in 161 companies and has been funding startups at a rate of nearly one per day in recent months.
SoftBank’s new investment in pharmaceutical company Roche Holding AG signals that the Japanese company might resort to safer stocks with stable free cash flow.
Compounding the situation might be that Softbank feels that they have been burnt by tech investment one time too many.
The ripple effect of China tech going down affects their assets as a whole and have concluded that the balance sheet needs trimming and re-upping.
Even if Softbank can find some balance sheet rejuvenation - they no longer feel they can take these extraordinary tech risks that achieve high beta which is required to satisfy investors.
Overall, we could be dealing with a dearth of real, legitimate tech opportunities in proven business models which could be a reason for Softbank rotating into sectors like pharmaceuticals.
No doubt I believe they will keep their eye out for tech opportunities, but they aren’t set on it from the beginning like the past 2 decades.
Or perhaps, this could be the segue into riskier investments than before - remember Uber (UBER) was a company that no VC wanted to touch with a 10-feet pole and Softbank took it on and made a lot of money. but where is the next Uber after Uber?
It's possible that there are no real, transformative companies in the pipeline after the Coinbase (COIN), Robinhood (HOOD) IPOs, these investments usually take 10-20 years to take profits from the initial seed funding.
It could also signal further advancements into the derivatives market with the company looking for leverage bets instead of holding vanilla equities and standard ETF index funds.
Their foray into derivate exposure gave them the nickname the “Nasdaq whale” when the company bought a torrent of call options profiting in the billions from the tech lurch up.
Even retail traders have gotten into options with their profit possibilities which are able to surpass any equity trade that only have a 2:1 leverage ratio.
Softbank could be finding tech too overvalued and looking to jump short-term into another industry almost like a day trader, although tech, for them, is something that is a long-term core objective.
We can analyze this whichever way we want but its meaning is clear – the low hanging tech fruit is gone, and it will be harder to fight for your crust of bread even much so that the Nasdaq whale is looking into morphing into the S&P whale or a different type of whale all together.
I can tell you that deep down in the weeds as a trader, I am seeing a rapidly evolving rotation that has rewarded cyclicals that are back from the dead and financials that are breaking out benefiting from the massive amount of stimulus deposits.
We need to acknowledge that the consumer is currently in the best health of our lifetime because of the free payouts, PPP loan forgiveness, and other goodies. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that tech will go up in the short-term as we skim all-time highs.
Technical charts still look positive for tech, but it is true that the sector has cooled off even if the trend will be higher long-term. It’s getting that much harder to eke out higher highs in the Nasdaq.
