Thank you very much for waiting. We would like to begin SoftBank Corporation. earnings results presentation for the three months ended June 30, 2025. We would like to introduce today's attendees. SoftBank Corporation. President and CEO Miyakawa, Board Director, Executive Vice President, and CFO Fujihara. Today's presentation will be broadcast over the Internet. Now President and CEO Miyakawa will give an overview of SoftBank consolidated financial results and business overview.
Miyakawa from SoftBank, thank you so much for your attendance today. I would like to begin by presenting our consolidated financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025. Since we've already shared our strategic vision at the shareholders meeting SoftBank World today, I'll focus primarily on our financial performance. First, revenue came in at JPY 1,658.6 billion, an 8% year-on-year increase with 25% progress toward our full-year forecast.
Given that our earnings typically rise in the second half, we believe this represents a strong start to the year. Looking at the breakdown, all segments saw revenue growth. Notably, our distribution and financial businesses each grew by more than 20%. Operating income was more than JPY 40 billion due to the gain on loss of control of LINE Yahoo. Excluding that, we still achieved a 6% increase in operating income. Our progress on operating income has reached 29% of the full-year forecast, showing steady advancement. As you can see, all business segments performed solidly. Only the consumer business posted a slight 2% dip in profit due to provisions. We expect a rebound from the second quarter and maintain our outlook for full-year growth, and net income excluding one-time factors also showed a modest 1% increase. We are progressing well with 27%.
To summarize our progress so far, we are off to a good start toward achieving JPY 1 trillion in operating income. Here is how each business segment is tracking. As you can see, progress in all segments is above 25%. Now I'd like to take a closer look at performance by business. We'll start with the consumer business. Revenue reached JPY 717.8 billion, up 5% from the previous year. Mobile services in particular continued to grow, adding another 5.5%, JPY 2 billion in revenue. Operating income in consumer business reached 28% of the full-year forecast, putting us on a solid path toward our growth target. Smartphone subscribers rose to 31.95 million, a 3% increase with net additions continuing to exceed 1,050,000 year on year. Next, the enterprise business revenue came to JPY 233.8 billion, a solid 8% increase driven by strong solution sales, which grew 13%.
Operating income grew to JPY 48.8 billion, up 18% year- on- year. In May, we announced a business partnership with Sumitomo Mitsui Card through which we will provide digital services to their Olive members. We are working closely with PayPay to build what we call a grand coalition of payments, leveraging each of our ecosystems. We are moving forward with plans to implement this solution in Sumitomo Mitsui Card's Contact Centers. We also expect this to be the first real world application of our AI Contact Center Call Center Solutions.
Next media and e-commerce business revenue was JPY 406.9 billion, up 2% with growth across all areas of the segment. Excluding one-term factors I mentioned earlier, operating income grew by 6%. Next finance business revenue was JPY 91.3 billion, showing 23% growth. Operating income reached JPY 18.1 billion, achieving more than double the result of the prior year. PayPay's gross merchandise value rose 24% year on year to JPY 4.5 trillion and PayPay's EBITDA increased to JPY 21.9 billion, up 87%. As for PayPay Bank, which is performing well, we are also expanding collaboration with PayPay Bank, encouraging account openings through integration with PayPay accounts. For SoftBank smartphone users, we've introduced preferential mortgage rate plans supporting the growth of outstanding loan balances. In July, we issued our first ever foreign bond raising $1 billion.
Thanks to strong investor interest and with access to foreign markets, we were able to diversify our funding options, and thanks to strong investor interest, we were able to fund at rates comparable to domestic bonds. In summary, excluding one-off factors, we achieved both revenue and profit growth.
The first quarter of fiscal year 2025. Progress to the full year forecast for operating income and net income were 29% and 27% respectively. Backed by the strong performance of PayPay, operating income in the finance business more than doubled. With the issuance of foreign bonds, we've successfully diversified our funding sources. That was a quick presentation today, and thank you very much for your kind attention. We'd like to take your questions from now on.
We will now open it up to a Q and A session. Questions will be taken first from the audience from the floor, then from the Zoom press, followed by Zoom analysts and institutional investors. If you wish to ask a question via Zoom, please access it via the previously announced procedure. Once you have accessed Zoom, please turn off the live webcast to prevent howling. We'd like to receive questions from as many people as possible, so please limit your questions to two per person. If you have been nominated, please state your company name and your name, please. Please raise your hand if you would like to ask. Question.
ITm edia Mobile. My name is Kaneko. It's not related to the earnings presentation, though. I have a question about administrative fees. NTT Docomo in August announced that they would amend the administrative fees, and SoftBank has also announced, but after the announcement by Docomo, it says on the website it says free of charge, but on the web SoftBank charges the administrative fees, so charging fees even on the web for ordinary consumers or those who are in the process of the contract. How would you like to explain to them?
Thank you for your question regarding the administrative fees. As for the web administrative fees, there is a cost for security measurement and also the self-identification confirmation and also the management fees for a payment transaction. Even though we have been doing the free of charge on that, now we have decided to start charging in order for us to improve our services even further. This was a must for us. I hope you could understand. Regarding the announcement, we are going to announce in many different tools and channels so that we can penetrate this information to as many people as possible. Thank you.
Any other questions from the floor?
One from Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper I have a question about admin fee or cost in general, due to increasing cost. Mio cassan has mentioned that you consider raising prices at the moment you decided to raise admin fee, but a tariff remains the same. So I wonder why you raised admin fee first before raising a tariff. That's the first question. And second, looking at competitors, Docomo raised a tariff, whereas a KDDI raised communication fee. So competitors are taking different approaches. So how do you see the market dynamics and competitors move and going forward other than other fee, is there any possibility that you transfer the raising cost to something to be charged.
Yes, because of increasing costs in general, we decided to raise administrative fee. Of course, we want to raise salaries for the staff at retail shops, and we made a decision finally to raise administrative fee. The purpose of raising administrative fee was the previous question, and try to address the question as much as possible, as open as possible, for the industry to grow in a healthy manner. I think revising a lot of fees, possible options, and of those options you may wonder why only administrative fee that you raised? We are trying to figure out the best way, and we had the news that minimum income would raise by 6% across Japan. Looking at the maintenance cost and our labor cost, there are reasons why we may need to raise compensations and eventually raise some prices. Again, we try to figure out the best timing at the best rate when we decide to raise prices. We are struggling currently. Now is the good time or not? That's the question we are asking ourselves.
I don't think that it's a good idea to have all competitors, all mobile carriers, doing the same. We try to find a way whereby customers would prefer us to other carriers. Once we reached a conclusion in our discussion internally, we will t ry to c ommunicate with you about competitors taking different approaches. The question about will we raise prices? Are we going to raise prices or are we going to launch new services, products we are discussing and considering, but it's too early to say anything concrete at the moment. Thank you.
Next question.
Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper. My name is Takahashi. This is not directly related to the earnings results, but the other day SoftBank announced about the GPU configuration utilizing NVIDIA's, and what kind of services you are thinking about providing and widely what is your AI strategy, of which the Rapidus one of your AI strategies, and what is your thoughts on the direction of the Rapidus and regarding GPU utilization?
We have prepared 10,000 GPUs and we are also building data centers as well, which is in progress under our plans. The services, a service deployment, and the computing infrastructure which is demanded by the society, and considering those, we are planning to increase. In the meantime, there are cases where GPUs are used, will be mostly on AI related for us. Sarashina Mini, our homegrown LLM, has been established, so this is to be rolled out.
We have secured enough CPUs for that, so in the second half of this fiscal year, we are going to install AI onto it. Also, Crystal Orchestration of A gentic AI will be ready, so considering its operation and the current GPUs is not enough, so considering the infrastructure, we will be utilizing GPU-as-a-Service. You mentioned about Rapidus. The other day, I also visited Hokkaido and joined the inauguration ceremony of Rapidus. It's a huge factory and with great equipment and super advanced technologies are equipped. This is just like, this is the Japan thing, very unique, so they have a solid strategy. I am very much looking forward to their future, and our positioning to Rapidus is that in Tomakomai City, we are constructing the data center, and now the foundation of the first structure construction has just begun, which will be used for data center.
The NVIDIA GPU chips will be used for now, but in the future, once Rapidus could make high performance chips, then we would like them to deliver right next to their factory to Tomakomai, and so that we can build our Japan's ecosystem. That's my dreams too. Therefore, we also have invested in Rapidus as well. Thank you.
Next question on the venue.
Sano, a freelance reporter. I have two questions about consumer business. You talked about tariff earlier like Docomo and KDDI, due to a strong churn of low rate plan, they decided to cancel a low rate. For your case, do you see increasing churn for the low price plan with low volume of data?
Yeah, like competitors we have low price brands LINEMO and Y!mobile, especially SIM standalone plan is something that value focus customer would pick. We are looking at the similar situation as other competitors are seeing with that. What's the positioning in the future for your low price plan? Like I mentioned before, we want to start from products that are affordable to users and get customers as many as possible. Once they get used to using data, they might upgrade the plan to a higher plan. We are looking at a steady brand migration from low to high. Entry point should be something that is easier for users or customers would pick. That kind of positioning is remaining the same for us.
Thank you. The second question. Looking at Opensignal report 5G sample network quality, there is a comparison between KDDI and SoftBank and the rating was higher for KDDI than SoftBank. What's your view on that? Especially what's your view on 5G standalone since you have limited bandwidth compared to other competitors. Again going forward, could you. There is no unique strategy with 5G SA.
Opensignal's comparison is looking at only two mobile operators in Japan for some reason. Some other carriers may be unhappy with that. I don't know whether Opensignal's comparison is fair or not. Regardless of that, SoftBank does not allow losing to competitors. We take the results seriously.
We've got a lot of excuses from my people, but I reject any excuses from our people. I think it's good for us mobile operators to compete with each other for better quality. As far as SoftBank is concerned, reliability is one of the things that we focus on. The report evaluated our reliability highly, which we are happy with. We have a corporate policy around reliability. Sometimes we build network focusing on speed. Sometimes you may want to build a network to have a better capacity. Our rate in terms of reliability was high and I'm happy with that. Talking about 5G standalone, that's not something special. We like to migrate to standalone as soon as possible and low latency and slicing technology can be fully leveraged with a standalone basis. We try to migrate our network to standalone as soon as possible but it is still taking time.
Next Newspapers Yamamoto, I have two questions related to communications. Docomo and KDDI renewed their pricing. What about SoftBank? Is there any change in the customer's position? The second is regarding the carrier shops. You also mentioned the increase of the wage and the number of shops. What do you think about the role of the physical shop?
Looking at other carriers, MNP, we also can get their data. Based on that data, NTT is doing well. However, what is the major cause, the factor of the increase of acquisition? The price should be the main factor. The answer should be that is pricing. For us, we have a strong will, wish to increase price, but if that can be accepted by our customers or not, that is everything that we are consistent about. We have been considering thoroughly, but we haven't taken any actual action towards that yet.
Your second question about carrier shops, for us, it's been the number of the carrier shops being flattish. For us, we are now thinking about reducing the number of carrier shops because we highly place their roles as important contact point to the consumers. We hold smartphone classes for the elderly so that we do not have to put anyone behind. Now, regarding this, how to use smartphones right now, but it will be advanced to how to use AI, and even further, it could be selling robots or autonomous vehicles, that be possible. At the time of implementation of AI, there will be another wave coming. Including the education to our crews, we would like to put our efforts.
Next question,
Ishino, freelance writer. Follow. A question on that impact from competitors' price change. KDDI slashed the lowest price plan, and also Docomo cancelled the low price plan as well. From your perspective, Y!mobile might be able to have a chance to get customers from them. I wonder what would be the positive impact on your MNP?
We have been performing well in Chunwood's MNP, so that was not particularly a weak reason why we had a net gain in terms of MNP. Y!mobile is performing well in general, but for low data volume plan or low price plan, the stronger competitor would be Rakuten . In that sense, we are competing against Rakuten in the area of low price plan.
Any other questions?
Bloomberg MJ, two questions. It's not directly related to the results, but regarding Rapidus. Right now, are you thinking about any additional investment on Rapidus or not?
Today, questions are either telecommunications or this kind of thing not related to our business results. Regarding Rapidus, we've invested JPY 1 billion in the first round. The second round, yes, we have been requested for, so I'm thinking about doing our best. That's because in Japan, they have come together to rebuild the semiconductor industry once again in Japan. Within our limit too, though, I would like to do our best. So, does that mean there is a possibility for additional investment? Yes, but I cannot just decide by myself because it has to go through our board members. Thank you. The second question is about PayPay IPO timing. What's your thought on that? About this, as of now, I cannot. I cannot talk about it. When the right timing comes, I would like to give you an update. Thank you.
Next question. Ishikawa, freelance journalist. A question about price. Again, I hear that Mia Carlson turned out to be a winner because competitors raised price and that may have given you a strong following wind. Have you changed your mind to raise a price like other companies did? We are looking at the right timing. Next question is about perhaps you had worked so long on aircraft type but you changed the balloon type because you don't want to lose against a computer. We were looking at both options, balloon and aircraft types, and Google used to have balloon project and we worked with them before and we found pros and cons in either hardware or aircraft or balloon. We changed the plan from aircraft to balloon because we found that we could get the regulatory permission to fly balloon.
We thought it would be very, very hard to get regulatory approval to fly balloon. The first comes first basis was in general when it comes to aircraft or regulatory permission in the airspace. It has been taking so long to get regulatory approval to fly aircraft. It may take as long as 2029, but we found that there was a maker in the state to get a regulatory approval to fly balloons soon. We applied ourselves and we got a positive response. We decided to start with balloon. Fundamental technology can be applied to both types, aircraft and balloon. Motors, batteries, and solar panels, those three important tools can be usable in either case. That was the background behind our decision.
Thank you. Any other questions? Today no questions about the figure number. What about. I thought we did really well though. The question, we would like to take questions from the Zoom press. If you have a question, please let us know by pressing the raise your hand button. Freelance Suzuki-san, please unmute and ask your question.
This is Suzuki. Freelancer , two questions. So PayPay, 70 million users been acquired and the PayPay group has been structured. Since before you said that PayPay can do even better. Now looking at IPO in the near future. What is your thought on PayPay?
Nakayama-san of PayPay, we have discussions very closely and now is the very, very critical phase. It's not the right timing for us to talk about t he positive factor of PayPay's growth is the expansion of GMV, which followed by the increase of revenue, and that's why their performance is well and the growth speed has been accelerated. Also within the support, we can do the other financial services to be grown. There is area, if there is area, we can support and we would like to provide support for them.
For now, you mentioned that the support you mentioned for PayPay, what kind of support you are thinking about, it's actually related to the two strategy. I just want to be brief on this because I'm concerned about PayPay's IPO. The second question, if you could answer to SoftBank's AI solutions and insurance health care as well. In 2025 was the timeline for that? What is the status of that? Do you have any vision on that? Regarding the contact center, will be implemented by the end of the year and other services. Once a system is estimated, then the service will be provided. The earliest will be within this year or early next year. It's not really far. Thank you.
Next, we'd like to start taking questions from analysts and institutional investors. The first, Masuno san from Nomura Securities. Please unmute and speak. Thank you.
My name is Masuno from Nomura Securities. I have two questions. First, about earning results. The other segment, the loss of JPY 12.4 billion, which was smaller than I thought. Actually, I believe that you're going to invest more and more and you may need to expect more red numbers for the full year. Also, GPU, you mentioned that you use whole GPU resources for internal purposes. At the AGM you mentioned that you would launch GPU-as-a-Service next year as a commercial offering. You may need to expect some net loss in the segment once you start offering commercial GPU-as-a-Service.
Thank you. For a question about usage of GPU, we have a subsidiary called SE Intuit and they are working on Sarashina and they are working on that and upgrading Sarashina. Based on the Sarashina, we have built Sarashina Mini, which is 70 billion parameters, and we plan to launch Sarashina Mini sometime autumn this year. We are currently utilizing the LLM as many as possible to improve and grow the LLM. We cannot sell whether free of charge or with a charge, we launch a Sarashina Mini sim and t he u se for that would be the most, so starting from autumn this year, again our plan is to launch a commercial GPU-as-a-Service.
Talking about the other segment, we budgeted JPY 100 billion for R&D but we have used only 10% of the R&D budget for this year. Again, we are talking about R&D budget. Less use of the budget would be better and we said that we have a budget, but if you want to use the budget, you need to deliver final product. Again, budget is there and we just let the researchers use on condition that they deliver something. If R&D budget has not been used fully, then we could expect some upside in terms of income and extra income. We would like to consider the use of extra income for shareholder return For example.
The next question is about Media EC business and finance business and today LINE Yahoo share price down by 11% and in your segment media EC and finance, how do you see those segments?
I believe it was 12% or more down Rakuten share price and I was a little bit surprised because Rakuten's financial result was not that bad. Finance segment, E-commerce segment losing money which is not good for us. We can take it back and we are confident going forward we will have AgentIQ AI available more and that could change the positioning of search engine and where people want to post advertisement. LINE Yahoo, for example, has been studying a lot anticipating such transformation. I have heard a lot of ideas from LINE Yahoo and I am impressed with their ideas.
I will wait and see how they perform and if they keep struggling, maybe SoftBank maybe we extend our supporting hands. Parent company U.S. and subsidiaries like LINE Yahoo want to work together to bring it forward. Yes, Rakuten share price dropped by 12% excluding the one quarter last year. LINE Yahoo posted net positive, yes, definitely effectively net positive. Rakuten suffered only one time factor and they posted a positive result which is impressive. I believe that there is still room for opportunity going forward in those areas.
Thank you. Next, SMBC Nikko Securities, Keikoje-san, please unmute.
Two questions. Maybe it's too early to ask, but this fiscal year as you expect and if you were to increase pricing, then you will win. Even though there may be some swings in the EC media segment, in the previous earnings results presentation I also asked about AI computing infrastructure and also in the next 10 years or 20 years. That would be your core business base. To do so, money and the resource need to be sufficient. Now, in the next three fiscal years, I think there is a limit that you can achieve, but towards the next mid long term business plan, what is your thought on that?
It's not going to be an easy win, so we would like to carefully work on further cost reduction as well. This year's JPY 1 trillion we are sure to achieve, so in the next fiscal year. This is my fifth year as CEO, and from the next fiscal year it will be the second cycle of the mid long term. I took over from Mr. Miyauchi and I made five ten year plan. This fiscal year I set my goal to complete some targets that I achieved. That includes for HAPS and others. I have taken some actions around those targets. Now, without AI related initiatives, we cannot make a thorough business plan for the next mid and long term. Regarding AI data centers, our existing data centers, its power is about 50 MW, and Sakai as a center we would like to increase up to 300 MW. We have secured power. If we do it all at once, it will cost like JPY 1 trillion level.
We would like to see the balance between the supply and demand, the same as we did for the base stations investment. We would like to set small goals towards our final goal. Regarding AI RAN, we have been developing together with NVIDIA. Now at Keio University campus, the performance has been also displayed, been tested, and we would like to challenge ourselves to become, want to make, since we do have a Sakai Factory. We would like to also challenge using some equipment and make something. In what stage and to do so, as we would like to see how it goes in different areas from the telecommunications area. I expect there will be some figures from the different areas other than telecommunications area. We would like to challenge to the next phase of the next mid long term business plan. We believe that we have set some foundations so far.
The second question. Excuse to ask this again, but price plan, what are you so concerned about? If you could share with us. For example, the Docomo's price tag, Docomo Max, that unique plan was introduced and KDDI increased the pricing, and then they're doing bundles, but bundles are really needed or not? That is a question as well. Each carrier price hike is not straightforward, it's a bit tricky, I think. When SoftBank was to increase price, how it can be done? You may not be able to share that, but what makes you concerned so much and what are you really concerned about?
I'm a person to answer any questions, but it's very close to our strategy related matters. One thing I could say here is that whether that can be accepted by consumers, our customers or not. I carefully check on the net, but I don't really see any positive feedback. I don't want to make an industry that customers are to leave, so that's one concern. I would say the second, to put in one word, Docomo, [KDDI] are strong competitors, but we cannot forget Rakuten . Three carriers including us are to go to the same direction. Rakuten may just get all good things, so we need to consider that point as well. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Next, Tokunaga-san from Daiwa Securities, please unmute.
I have two questions. First, to summarize for this quarter, apparent improvement of the gross margin and you got a lot of consumer customers and then you may not need to raise prices, but again in the consumer business for the quarter, what's your view in summary and ARPU, how much decrease of ARPU is acceptable to you?
Yes, I agree consumer business performed well. Actually, ARPU, consumer ARPU didn't go down, enterprise went down, so in total we saw decrease of ARPU. Consumer grew good and enterprise did not perform well, so I'm not worried about consumer business at all. Thank you.
Second question is about the GPU-as-a-Service. Looking at the Sakura Internet's financial results, they downgraded forecast because of a decreasing demand, but for SoftBank case, only for the internal use you need more GPU capacity. Maybe you don't have to worry about the demand when it comes to commercial service, so what will be the prospect customers for the GPU-as-a-Service and also internal uses versus commercial offering, which is higher in priority for the use of GPU capacity?
At the moment, we don't really release a GPU on its own. Rather, what we do Is n ot lending hardware but lending capacity as a GPU-as-a-capacity, so our data center can offer GPU-as-a-capcapacity, not as hardware. The next big wave will be Crystal, and Crystal is for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers want to put their data in data centers in Japan, not outside Japan. Currently, we are using OpenAI GPU. OpenAI, obviously, is an American company, and when it comes to commercial offering, however, maybe we should look at Azure. Sorry, enterprises are looking at Azure for better protection of the data. That's an approach that we need to think about. Depending on how Crystal goes, the GPU capacity that we have at the moment is not enough at all. We will see how the demand of Crystal goes. Going forward, the biggest demand comes from Crystal, at the moment, Crystal and call center Agentic AI for enterprise customers, which is ready for commercial product. Once we see a trend in demand, we may need to raise GPU capacity going forward.
If you have any questions, please press the raise your hand button. Today after a long time, there is this presentation. This is the one that there is a need for CFO. This concludes Q and A session. We conclude SoftBank Corporation. earnings results presentation for the three months ended June 30, 2025. Today's presentation will be available on demand on our website later today. Once again, thank you very much for your time today to attend SoftBank Corporation. earnings results presentation for three months ended.