SoftBank (SFTB.Y 1.24%) has spent nearly $3 billion repurchasing shares since the end of March when it announced shareholder-friendly moves to shore up cash and buyback stocks.
In a press release, the Japanese tech stock said that as of March 31, it has acquired 71,536,700 of its shares, paying 311.7 billion yen or $2.9 billion. The company plans to purchase a total of 145,000,000 shares spending a maximum of 500 billion yen and has already completed 60% of purchases. The share repurchase program runs through March 15, 2021.
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Struggling with mounting losses in its Vision Technology fund and facing pressure from shareholders, SoftBank announced at the end of March it was engaging in a massive restructuring program to raise capital and silence critics including $41 billion in asset sales and $18 billion in share repurchases. That’s in addition to the $4.8 billion in buybacks the company announced earlier in March.
Since that announcement, SoftBank reported a nearly $18 billion loss for its Vision Fund in the fiscal year ended March 31. The losses were largely due to write-downs of its investments in WeWork and Uber Technologies. SoftBank said at the time Uber represented $5.2 billion of the losses while WeWork contributed $4.6 billion. The rest of its investments made up the remaining $7.5 billion of losses. Last month SoftBank announced plans to sell a stake in its Japanese wireless holdings.
