Thank you very much for waiting, everyone. Now, we would like to start the SoftBank Group earnings results announcement for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025. First of all, I would like to introduce today's participants. From left, we have Yoshimitsu Goto, Board Director and CFO. Kazuko Kimiwada, Corporate Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer, Senior Vice President and Head of Accounting Unit. Navneet Govil, CFO, SB Investment Advisors and SB Global Advisors. Jason Child, Executive Vice President and CFO. Today's announcement is live broadcast over the Internet. Now, I would like to invite Yoshimitsu Goto to present you the earnings results and business overview.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for sharing your time with us today. Today is a kind of a summary for the fiscal year, a whole year, full year. Let me dive into the presentation. The past one year, economical trend, market environments, it's been very uncertain, very unclear, continues to grow. U.S. tension has been escalated. Market, including Japan, has been confused with the situation. At the same time, unfortunately, we've been seeing ongoing conflicts across the regions. After Mr. Trump assumed president, there are many policies, direction changes, which also impacted the market. Of course, leaders, head of the countries, they always focus on the prosperity of their own country.
When you think about the worldwide, peaceful system, optimal for everyone, which everyone has been enjoying the free trade in the past, the free trade also makes some disadvantage as well. From that sense, U.S. position is not always selfish. Cost for maintaining the peace in global wide is something that we need to focus. Otherwise, we cannot really solve the situations. I believe tariff is one of the options for that solution as well. I believe that's something that we need to focus, refocus once again from the market and financial industry as well. Under such circumstance, how are we going to do in SoftBank Group without any change? We keep focusing on our corporate philosophy of information revolution, happiness for everyone. This marks the 44th year since the foundation of the business.
From the beginning of the company, beginning of the business, we started with the distribution of PC software. That was the motivation to start the business by Mr. Son. Gradually, we start revisiting what is the information revolution every time. The information revolution right now is AI revolution from AGI to ASI. How can we benefit society and the people? How can we address, and how can we play the role for such changes? That's the kind of the things that we always need to pay attention to. This has been used for the AGM last year. To make this ASI realize, there are four things that we need to focus right now. First is the AI chip.
This is going to be the core of the AI so that Arm and other companies need to focus on AI chip and also robotics, which also requires data center to support for the evolution of the AI and also the generative AIs. For that, we need energy. Those are the agenda that we've been thinking for the past few years. This year, I believe that it's been a year of green shoots. More specifically, I believe these are the actions that we made based on that understanding. First, that we announced the Stargate project in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, MGX, and at the same time, announced the Crystal Intelligence with a partnership between SoftBank Group and OpenAI. An additional off-loan investment to OpenAI has been committed and up to $30 billion upon full syndication. We also decided to acquire Ampere for $6.5 billion.
That's a part of our strategy for the future growth of our AI strategy, AI revolution. That is expected to be closed in the second half of 2025. We were able to make such big steps in this fiscal year. Many people wondered, what's SoftBank doing? What are you going to do? There are many questions also concerned about what we are going to do. This time with this fiscal year, we were able to show what is the action that we are taking. For the fiscal year 2024, as a financial summary wise, these are the highlights. First of all, we've been seeing the weaker performance of tech stocks so that we've been seeing also the big market volatility and net asset value at the end of March, JPY 25.7 trillion, down JPY 2.1 trillion year over year.
Still, JPY 25 trillion net asset value with the high liquidity, which I believe is the only one company in Japan which has a high liquidity in net asset value, also maintaining financial policy on loan to value and cash in hand, no change for the fiscal year 2025 as well. Net income of JPY 1.15 trillion, up JPY 1.38 trillion year over year, first profit in four years as an investment company. Most important KPI has been a bit different from enterprise value, I believe. However, still, net income, having a net income profitability is a very good thing. I believe we are very happy to see this profit in four years and progress toward realizing ASI, so that is target announced following investment in OpenAI. Quite a large number amount has been announced. These are the highlights for the fiscal 2024. Key indicators.
These three indicators we always revisit with you. Net asset value, as you saw, JPY 25.7 trillion, loan to value 18% compared to last year, March end, 8.4%, 10% point increase. At the same time, we have guidelines of the 25% for loan to value or safety level so that we still have a very good headroom there. Cash position, as we actively made an investment, so the cash position decreased from JPY 4.7 trillion- JPY 3.4 trillion, but still JPY 3.4 trillion is very much good level of the cash position from our understanding. Of course, earnings announcement is to show you the end of the quarter, which is March end. However, our net asset value changes based on the share price. Based on this morning's share price, we made a pro forma numbers here on your far right.
As of this morning, net asset value JPY 27.4 trillion recovered from JPY 25.7 trillion, so about the same level as last year, March end. Loan to value also been improved. Cash position, we've been spending a little bit, so JPY 3.3 trillion. That is the latest, latest performer numbers because we are the company watching the balance sheet. I also wanted to share this performer number with you. And these are the history of the net asset value. Net asset value is the most important indicator for us to see a business. Our share price is coming from here, I believe. Of course, market changes varies every day. It goes ups and downs. If it goes up, we are happy. If it goes down, it's unfortunate. However, it's not something that we should be being happy or not happy every day. We should be it's not the quarterly basis.
It's not the annual basis. I believe we need to see 10 years, 20 years as an investment company to end whether are we showing the tendency to increase our value. From that sense, I believe this is the most important slide to share with you. Cash position, we have ample financial resources, JPY 3.3 trillion. This covers two-year debt redemption, which set it for our financial policy. Loan to value, 18.0% as of the end of March, 20% pro forma basis. Our policy is to maintain our loan to value less than 25%. As of today, we still have a very good headroom here. There may be some fluctuation here. Sometimes we kind of hit the gas for the investment activities, but sometimes market volatile so that it may hit 25% threshold.
Still, I believe that we do need to make sure and share that how we're going to bring it back. At the same time, try to avoid such situation. We would like to manage our financials as much as possible. Now, consolidated results. Net sales, JPY 7.2 trillion, up by JPY 487 billion year on year, mostly driven by SoftBank Corp. Gain on investment was JPY 3.7 trillion or up by JPY 460 billion, sorry, JPY 4.2 trillion. Income before income tax, JPY 1.7 trillion. Net income, JPY 1.1 trillion. As you can see, our performance was pretty good last year. Let me elaborate on gain on investment later. If you could go over each topic, net income. In FY 2020, we recorded almost JPY 5 trillion, but we have been suffering negative numbers since. It's been improving.
In FY 2024, we saw the positive number for the first time in four years to JPY 1.1 trillion. There is a correlation between gain or loss investment and net income on a quarterly basis, but trend-wise, it has been going up. In the latest quarter, we posted a very strong result, which we are pleased with. Talking about gain or loss on investments, which are fluctuating every quarter, I should elaborate on this. Sometimes we sold assets earlier or with the prepaid forward contract like Alibaba. We monetized based on the fixed share price. Then the share price went up on an accounting basis. We can post up gain, but we also have to record delivery loss. From investment gain or loss perspective, we cannot net out.
If you can look at the colored bars, those are including Alibaba, for which we already sold shares due to prepaid forward contract. We posted JPY 1.5 trillion gain on investment, but dotted line shows delivery loss. For example, Q2, JPY 1.5 trillion, and Q4, JPY 1.2 trillion, and Q3, JPY 686 billion delivery gain in Q3 of JPY 3.7 trillion gain on loss on investment. Our real power is reflected in the colored bars. All in all, this is the final result. Gain or loss in investment is reflected in income before income tax. Deducting delivery loss, our actual capability is around able to yield around over JPY 1 trillion of income or gain on investment. Foreign exchange, while it was fluctuating in the last quarter, for example, as of March 31, it was JPY 151 per dollar last year. As of March 31, 2025, JPY 149 per dollar.
In span one year, it was a little impact on the result. I'd like to share some segment basis reports, starting from Vision Fund. This quarter was a profit gain, and actually the Vision Fund 1 contribution was large. Vision Fund 2, due to the public securities impact, was there. Maybe we can touch on a little bit more details later pages. Here is the breakdown of gain and loss. If you see the Vision Fund 1, dark blue, mainly ByteDance. Based on the valuation, this is coming from the market factors. As a result, out of the $1.8 billion numbers, majorities are coming from this market factor, preliminary ByteDance. On your right-hand side, Vision Fund 2. The agreement is a positive one, which is preliminary, primarily OpenAI. Originally we had a portion already, and in April made the latest round.
Using that valuation as referring to recent transactions. The public portfolios were a bit of a drop. Although it was a very good market in India, however, some slowdown and also the drops in share price of those portfolios in India was one of the reasons for that. Hopefully, we'll be able to see the good recover from there. Here is the cumulative gain and loss on investments. There were some big drops in the past, but now that we are coming very much back to the water phase, and there are still good pipelines for the Vision Fund, which is something that makes me excited. After this, hopefully we'll be able to see better numbers going forward. I'm convinced that we'll be able to share good news going forward. Here is the cumulative investment return.
Vision Fund 1, $90 billion investments, performance $113 billion. Pretty good so far. On your right-hand side, Vision Fund 2, $60 billion investment. We are still return here at $37.9 billion. We like to show you the good return of the performance of the Vision Fund 2. Here are the pipelines for the future growth. From the left-hand side, we had made 55 listings of the portfolio companies since the inception of the Vision Fund. In fiscal 2024, five companies went public, a little bit smaller than the other years, but there were good IPOs. Also, late-stage companies which matured in the way so that the total fair value of the late-stage portfolio is right now $36 billion. These are the logos of the late-stage companies. Not only this, of course, there are others as well, but these are especially the highlights. For example, ByteDance, Klarna.
Klarna actually was ready for the IPO, but has postponed. Kabak, Fanatics. Of course, OpenAI. Those can be the good upside for the future after the IPO. Of course, I forgot the PayPay. Not to forget a PayPay one below the OpenAI. Those are actually the good potential contributor for the uplift of the performance of the Vision Fund going forward. The new investments in fiscal 2024, there are several, but for example, these are the companies that we made in fiscal 2024. You see the OpenAI logo many, many times, but at the same time, Helion, this is the next generation fusion technology company. It may also can be the good driver to changing the world, Green Runaway. Those are great companies too.
Those companies that relate to AI and AI revolution, and also the expected good upside, it's something that we, Vision Fund team, are working on to explore so that we will be able to find those good numbers, companies. ARM is also big in our portfolio. ARM posted a great result, steadily performing well in FY 2024. They posted record high annual revenue, license and other revenue, royalty revenue. Again, it's been going well. Non-GAAP operating income grew steadily, posting a 31% increase year on year, which is great. What is the growth driver of royalty revenue? They have some building blocks of their revenue, including royalty revenue. Compute Subsystem should support further growth of royalty revenue. CSS is an IP package with ARM design. By adopting CSS, you can reduce the development time and cost. Royalty rate of CSS is higher than Armv9.
In the past, CSS was adopted in data center, mobile markets, and PC. They signed the first automotive CSS license agreement with a major EV car OEM. As you can see, as CSS is going across diverse markets, we can expect more royalty revenue. From the perspective of accelerating further penetration of Armv9, which also supports royalty revenue. Armv9 is the latest CPU architecture, which has been deployed in mobile, PC, data center, and automotive sectors. For the first time, they announced Cortex-A320, which is the smallest Armv9-based CPU implementation for IoT and edge devices. We're talking about edge AI, which is going to be more and more important going forward. Not a cloud, but on the edge side, device side, more and more demands are there to process AI on the device side. Arm plays an important role. Why?
Because Arm's solution has energy efficiency improvement by 50%. With limited power, edge needs to run. Focusing on edge devices is going to be very important. Rene, Arm CEO, said AI is everywhere. You cannot run AI without Arm. Edge AI's penetration would be supporting Arm's further growth going forward. Arm's guidance was announced for the first quarter of 2025, revenue-wise from $1 billion-$1.1 billion, for example, or 6.5%-17.1% compared to last year's quarter. Non-GAAP operating expenses expected to $625 million. They have not announced a full year guidance, only quarter guidance, because things are so fluctuating and the tax or tariff issue could make a lot of changes going forward. Arm made a decision not to disclose a guidance for the full year. Here is the OpenAI follow-on investments. This March, we had committed follow-on investments in OpenAI.
Commitment is up to $40 billion, of which $10 billion is syndicated out to third parties. For SoftBank Group's point of view, it is up to $30 billion. There are some agreements. This $40 billion, one of the scenarios is that the $40 billion can be reduced down to $20 billion, as you may know, that the OpenAI reorganization, whether it is going to be completed or not, is one of the agendas. Without such completion within this year, this $40 billion will be reduced down to $20 billion. Of course, we are expecting and hoping to be able to see the good completion of the reorganization. Based on that, we will be making our activities for the financial activities. An advantage of OpenAI, back in 2018, GPT-1 was launched and GPT-3 in 2020.
Here that the people start realizing the name of OpenAI, ChatGPT. Some people may say that what was this company, what's the service they are providing? After then, that they are making a steady evolution. In addition to GPT, that they are also launching the inference-enhanced model. This relentless technological evolution has been made by OpenAI. That made a big delta between them and the others. That actually keeps them a very strong position in the industry. This March, a weekly active user actually reached to 500 million. I also like to share the comparison data with the competitors, but we don't have the most accurate numbers. I believe the market share of the OpenAI can be around 80%. They have a very big advantage in terms of the market share, from my understanding. The delta with the competitors is very large.
This was also touched at the third quarter announcement. Once you have such a big difference, this is really difficult to exceed the front runner. In this stage, because OpenAI has been developing their service and products at a very rapid pace, they were able to maintain the strong positions in the industry. Now I believe OpenAI's service is becoming a de facto standard for the world users, and that is also making a great value for the company. Stargate is a project that we announced. By developing this project, we will be able to provide a data center, huge data center. For that, we will be having a collaboration from the chip makers, energy power producers, power generators.
With those collaborations, we will be able to provide the data center capacity to OpenAI so that OpenAI will be able to enhance their service and products so that the application layers or the users of such service will be able to even develop afford for their services and products. That will change people's lifestyles. Stargate, by partnering with OpenAI, will be able to transform the society and the people's life. That is something that I am expecting from here. The Stargate programs here, right now, there are more than hundreds of proposals being made. We are having a due diligence for those sites. Still, not being able to announce first yet. I believe that the one will be coming out from the state of Texas. Maybe first, second, and third will be coming from the state of Texas.
There are several going on parallelly so that we are not yet sure. I cannot really be specific which one will be the first, but I believe we are very close there. There are some media reporting and so on, and some media covering that the banks are hesitating to finance something like that. However, that's not really true. Actually, we are very much making progress and making good steps here. Overview of Crystal Intelligence, which SoftBank and OpenAI signed a partnership agreement to develop enterprise AI agent. SoftBank plays a key role in customizing for different customers. Customized Crystal Intelligence should be marketed across Japan. For that, we established and we decided to establish a joint company, OpenAI Japan. Talking about Crystal Intelligence, what would happen with Crystal Intelligence?
Miyakawa-san announced the financial results the other day, and he said that they were discussing with OpenAI and trying to develop a best solution for a company to transform the business management overall, not only optimizing individual business areas, but also completely optimize the corporate as a whole. Phase one was individual optimization, which should not have a positive impact on the corporate-wide business management. So Crystal Intelligence should help a company to completely transform and optimize the overall business management. Again, from individual optimization to overall optimization, as illustration, if you can look at the left-hand side, with AI, you could implement different teams or different organizations. Those individual organizations are not necessarily coordinated well. With Crystal Intelligence, by having AIs working together across different business units, this should help a company to completely transform the business management.
Acquisition of Ampere, which was announced in March, total $6.5 billion. Quite a large number here. It's been a while since we announced a large amount of the investment last. Closing is expected to be the second half of this year. Company overview here, they have about 1,000 engineers, an AI cloud, AI-focused semiconductor designer company. They actually design ARM-based server chips for cloud and AI specifically. Ampere, actually, Arm used to be the shareholder of this company as well. This is another thing that I wanted to highlight. The reason for the rationale behind the acquisition here, there are three points. First, that we wanted to secure the highly skilled engineers. They have about 1,000 very matured, well-trained engineers there. This is also the company that is playing a very important role for the semiconductor design.
They have an expertise in taping out chips. They have lots of experience in several products that they've been working on, the taping out of the chips. That rich experience is also important, which means I believe they have a very good project management capability. In addition to that, this company can also complement Arm's design strength because they have been designing Arm-based server chips for cloud and AI, so that's going to also enhance and complement the capacity and capability of the group overall. With that, we hope we will be able to strengthen the group's semiconductor business to realize ASI. SoftBank Group's AI strategy, it's becoming clearer with those, I believe. Last year, in addition to Ampere, we also had an acquisition of Graphcore.
ARM being a center, we've been acquiring those businesses of Graphcore and Ampere so that we'll be able to enhance the AI compute. With that, we would like to store the necessary computing power to the data center with Stargate. With the latest AI model, it can be utilized for the AI applications so that these companies are going to be enhancing the quality of AI and the quality of the company's business. That's going to lead to the transformation of people's working style and the lifestyle. By having these three companies under the umbrella of SoftBank Group, our semiconductor engineers count up to 8,400. For other Japanese companies, having such a large number of engineers is very few. Of course, ARM, Graphcore, Ampere, they are not a Japanese company. However, the SoftBank Group, as a Japanese company, they are our group companies.
They are our family. We believe this is a good number that we have as our capabilities for the engineers. Next, PayPay. They started preparing for IPO. PayPay is quite a young company, but they fully utilize the resources in their company and the business model of PayPay. I believe that Masayoshi Son has a great contribution to building the business model for PayPay. SoftBank, Line Yahoo, they are working. We are working with SoftBank and we are working with PayPay, sorry, through SoftBank, Line Yahoo, and also investment made by SoftBank Vision Fund and Paytm provide technical support to launch PayPay system. We really appreciate Paytm's great support at the beginning of the PayPay. It has been busy in the last years. Before they knew it, they realized they have over 68 million in just 6.5 years since launch.
PayPay is used by one in two people in Japan and two in three smartphone users. PayPay has a very strong position in the market share. They have pretty decent KPIs. First, they get coverage and then go deeper. In other words, get the market as wide as possible, even though spending costs. Once you got the great coverage, you should shoot for generating revenue and income. EBIT for fiscal year 2024 was JPY 45 billion and GMV JPY 15.4 trillion, or 23% increase year on year. I believe that PayPay is fully ready for IPO. As a company, they are ready, but is it enough? Not necessarily. Why? Because market condition is very important. Again, market has been volatile in the last 12 months, whether this year or next year or in three years.
We never know when is the best timing for PayPay to go public. Looking at the market conditions and PayPay's corporate maturity level, they should figure out the best timing for IPO. They completely transformed themselves from just payment application to digital transformation. They reorganized their structure to support card business, banking business, and securities business. They are now a very decent financial platform, and PayPay's value should be increasing further more. In financial strategy, basically no change. That's the most important thing. However, we see the differences or the changes in the environment, we would like to ensure full readiness to promptly shift to a more defensive financial operation when necessary. Our financial policy unchanged, which is maintaining loan to body below 25% and also maintaining at least two-year worth of the bond redemptions in cash. Mr.
Trump just celebrated the 100-day anniversary after the assumption of president, but the environment has changed dramatically. In a high-uncertain environment, we would like to engage in financial activities with prudence and boldness to build a solid foundation for net asset value growth. To make such a growth, we do need to think what is the best action that we should be making at the time. As a company, for decision-making point-wise, our capital allocation is only three: new investments, return to shareholders, or enhancement of the balance sheet. We would like to pursue the best mix and best balance of those three so that we will be able to enhance our enterprise value. Continuously, we would like to work on that.
That is something that we always discuss internally, especially when it comes to the financial activity-wise investment, financing, loan to value. Those are the strengths that we have. As we have been cultivating the financial foundation developed over years of disciplined financial management, we would like to swiftly address any market fluctuation, market change. At the same time, we would like to respond in synchronized with management. We have MASA, board of directors meeting, board of directors members that we would like to keep the space with them so that we will be able to synchronize with their movement, their actions, and at the same time to address any changes in the market. Financing, always like to explore the variety of the option. We have been addressing many optionalities as well, trying to meet up the needs at the time. For example, is it the bonds?
Is it the loan or in debt? We would like to understand and take advantage of each market, considering the stakeholders in the bond market, loan market, having a good discussion so that we will be able to choose the best of the scheme for the financing activities. Loan to value, we would like to maintain strict discipline in loan to value management. Investment amount, last year, $7.9 billion, close to $8 billion. The previous year was $3.49 billion. Compared to fiscal 2023, 2024 was about doubled. This year, as of April 15, 2025, because we had several large acquisitions, the amount has been cumulated. After this, as I mentioned about the commitment to OpenAI, up to $30 billion, and also $6.5 billion of Ampere is going to be coming this year.
We believe that the amount can be larger for the investment. Still, I believe we'll be able to keep the good balance with our safetiness on the soundness of our financials so that we'll be able to make a healthy growth of the business. Like our safetiness, healthiness, and also the growth is something that we would like to pursue and also would like to share with the stakeholders. Because of the first investment in OpenAI and also the Ampere acquisition was parallelly addressed, therefore that $6.5 billion of the Ampere and also $8.5 billion of the OpenAI for loan investment, total $15 billion, it's about JPY 2.3 trillion probably. That's quite a large amount, and we made it structured as a bridge loan, but fortunately we were able to have a very good bank group to be able to have this bridge loan structured.
$15 billion syndication here. Actually, demand has more than two times more than that. So 20 institutions, Mizuho, JP Morgan, SMBC, and other important bankers. Actually, twice that speed of the project that we were able to conclude. OpenAI, Ampere, those are very strategic investments for our future growth, and we have a Stargate for the next phase. We believe three years, five years ahead, we always share with the bankers how we are looking at the future. Whenever we have such a project, we are very much thankful for those bankers to be able to address such needs because I believe we have a good communication with those bankers for our future outlook and our strategy. Share buyback, share repurchase, also like to share with you the status.
Last year, August, we have made an announcement of the maximum JPY 500 billion of the share repurchase, and we have done JPY 286 billion. It is a 57% progress so far. We will be aiming towards the maximum JPY 500 billion with the optimal way of buying back our shares. Dividend, no change. This time again, JPY 22 for interim, year-end JPY 22 per share. We would like to maintain this dividend per share. I believe this is also in line with analyst forecast, but I saw some different numbers in some coverage, but I believe the majority of the people have an inline forecast with this dividend. Fiscal 2024 highlights, net asset value, financial policy, net income, and Stargate OpenAI actual actions. Those are the kind of highlights for the fiscal 2024. I thought I should show Masasan's picture, at least one.
I don't know if he's watching this today or not, but anyway, realizing ASI for human evolution is what he talked about last year. What is the business SoftBank Group is doing? Often asked that question. SoftBank Group is information revolutionalist. That would be our answer because it's our mission and our vision is to realize information revolution. Looking back, our philosophy has been always consistent. What is the information revolution then? When you start a business, Mr. Son used computer software by himself, and he wanted all people in Japan to utilize software. There were no ways for the general public to purchase software, computer software, because there were not electricity, sorry, or home appliance shops to easily buy computer software. He started the company to sell computer software. He started it as a distributor of computer software.
The users want to know in advance what's fun with the software or the game. He started publishing business. He provided publishing for the people to understand what's good about software. Selling software or distributing publishing, that's an infrastructure he wanted to build for companies to utilize technology. In 2000, from scratch, he wanted to start a boardwalk business, which was a surprise for me. From a finance guy perspective, it was not an easy job to support the launch. He wanted to start boardwalk business because he wanted people to use his services at a very speedy speed. We went through challenging times in terms of financing the business and running the business. We have been doing this consistent thing, even though our product offerings are different, but those product offerings are for people to use information service.
We provide infrastructure for people to use information service. We have been consistent from the beginning, which is to provide basic infrastructure for people to use information service. I showed this slide earlier. A year ago, did we have all tools in the toolbox? Not. We had Arm in AI chip place, and we had a robot business in AI robot. When it comes to data center, we did not have a tool. Energy, we did not have a lot. Since then, we have a lot more tools in a toolbox. We can play a baseball game in the professional league, as opposed to an amateur league, if you will. SoftBank Group has been pretty good, and we are capable enough. 18 years ago, we used this chart for the financial result announcement to explain what kind of businesses we wanted to deliver.
Likewise, we had three layers: infrastructure, portal, and content. We wanted to have all layers in place to deliver our product offerings. Now, in the era of AI, we are doing pretty much the same as 18 years ago. I did not really copy the format of the presentation of 18 years ago, but I realized we are doing pretty much a similar thing than before. We have been growing. It has been 20 years since the inception of the company. Our role in AI and ASI is something that we keep thinking about myself. Thank you.
Now, we would like to take questions. First, we would like to take questions from the floor. Please wait for the microphone and start with your name and affiliation. For those who are on Zoom, please access the Zoom and press the raise hand button and wait for your name to be called.
If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the raise hand button. Please also refrain from connecting to other live streams to avoid any echoing. For those who are on Japanese Zoom, please make your question in Japanese. We would like to take up to two questions per person so that we can take questions from as many people as possible. First, we would like to take questions from the floor. If you have any, please raise your hand. Thank you. それでは皆様から見て右手側のエリア、一番. The first front row person, please. Oh, no, from Yomiuri Newspaper. I have two questions. First is about Stargate. Thank you for sharing the progress of Stargate. The tariff situations by Mr. Trump, semiconductor required for the data center, maybe have a price change due to the tariff, and the environment has been changing.
Is there any effect to the current preparation, or how much impact do you see from such tariff policy? My second question is about OpenAI. Recently, they announced that they gave up on restructuring to the profit organization. OpenAI Global's additional investment, has any impact from that change? That's my two questions.
Stargate for your first question. That was announced in January. The tariff discussion had not been started back then. Compared to that time, that was actually the event after the announcement of the Stargate project. Things are changing every day. At this moment, I do not want to be too specific. We try to explore the best decision, best option at the time. I do not think the tariff itself is going to stop the project progress or something like that. We would like to wait and see a little bit.
More than that, the project itself is something that we would like to make sure to launch, and that negotiation is very important for us. For your second question about OpenAI, recently, OpenAI updated their blog. Also, the media has been covered, and there was some misunderstanding. Like you said, the media is saying giving up on becoming the profit organization. I do not think that is the correct understanding. The shareholder of the order holding company is the nonprofit, and underneath, the company which does the business. More specifically, nothing has been changed at this moment. They just show the direction of the structure. That is what has been announced. At this moment, nothing has really happened or changed, just to discuss the direction. For us, I do not think that is the wrong direction, a bad direction. That is something that we have been expected.
Our investment is in the business vehicle. This is hopefully that they'll be able to grow, then that I believe that's a good thing for our investments.
Thank you. Next question, please.
Ayagi from Nikkei. First question is about OpenAI. Investment amount, what would be investment amount? It would be half or $30 billion remained the same? Before such press coverage was there, what kind of conversation did OpenAI have with you? Investment amount to OpenAI as an underwrite of $40 billion, as you can see in the chart in my presentation. Investment from SoftBank Group, I believe, is your question. Even though we underwrite $40 billion, but of them, $10 billion would be syndicated to third-party investors. Our principle is $30 billion as an investment amount. Probability-wise, what if there is no third-party investor?
It could be $40 billion, but in fact, already some investment was made. It is not going to be $40 billion in total because already some part was syndicated. Commitment would be from $40 billion to $20 billion, then our investment would be up to $20 billion according to a certain condition. We assume the maximum investment amount to drive our financial strategy. At this moment, I believe that terms were included in the agreement that could reduce the amount down to $20 billion. At the moment, is such event happening? No. Event is not happening now. If such event takes place by the end of the year, then reduce from $40 billion to $20 billion. We never know when such event takes place. Second question, again about OpenAI. Your investment amount could be up to JPY 3 trillion maximum.
Are you going to be a major shareholder of OpenAI or a leading investor of OpenAI? Or how do you want to position OpenAI after following investment? Our investment amount, you mentioned major shareholder or subsidiary. Even though we invested $30 billion, still minority investment. It is not going to be our making OpenAI as a subsidiary. The first investment in April was done by Vision Fund 2. We had made investment in OpenAI last year several times, and we did investment several times since the beginning of fiscal year 2020, sorry, calendar year 2025. Because of that, we wanted to utilize Vision Fund as a vehicle. Now we are talking about a big number. We want to figure out the best approach for us to make an investment in such a big amount in OpenAI. Any other questions, please? Third row from the front.
MG from Bloomberg. Different subject. Recently, SoftBank has an investment in relation to crypto. The media coverage has been shared. Last time, you made an investment in FTX, and after making a loss from FTX, I believe that SoftBank was not paying too much attention to the crypto. What is the background for setting up this venture company? We made an investment in the company called Tether. Personally, I hate or I do not like crypto, but that is nothing to do with a business decision. The crypto itself is becoming a certain level of the size as an asset to be managed. There are many investors. I believe this vehicle or the entity will be able to provide opportunities for the investors to invest or to manage their assets.
Of course, we are not investing in the bitcoins or the crypto itself, but investing in such an entity which will provide made available for the access by the investors for the Tether and Tether's group allocation. How are they going to grow is one of the questions. Of course, that we need to learn more about the crypto market. That is why we come to this decision of investing in this company a little bit deeper than we used to have as a position of the crypto. It is not that we are going to directly invest in or selling crypto itself. My second question is about OpenAI once again.
The Vision Fund will be investing quite a big amount in OpenAI. That seems to leave little room for extra investments in other companies.
I'd like to ask the overall strategy for Vision Fund going forward in the new fiscal year. Thank you.
Yes. For Vision Fund 2, we don't have any limitations of the size of the fund. If it's necessary, if there are any necessary funds, we can upsize the Vision Fund 2. This time, April, OpenAI investment was a large amount. That doesn't mean that we are not going to do any other investment at all. We will be looking into good pipelines explored by the great fund managers, investment managers in Vision Fund. If there are any good companies, we would like to make investment in such.
Thank you. Any other questions from the floor?
Shelter from TV Tokyo. Sorry, again, question about OpenAI.
If investment amount was down from 40- 20, in a project like a Stargate project, what kind of a difference would that make in the project that you are working on with OpenAI? Could you give us a color, please? Yes. If amount down from 40- 20, 20 is still big enough, JPY 3 trillion. It's not going to change the relationship between OpenAI and SoftBank Group. We are together running a big business project, and I believe that OpenAI is closest to us than any other companies to drive AI efforts, be it Crystal Intelligence or Stargate. They are huge and very close relationship. It doesn't matter whether our investment amount is 40 or 20 or big or small. Thank you. Next question. Looking at SoftBank Group's history, you have been captured advantage of borderless information service or information itself.
If going forward, information will be limited by national borders, what kind of impact or negative impact that you should anticipate? What your political risks are, I think what you are talking about. You are right. Geopolitical risks could have an impact on services and businesses. If U.S.-China tension continues and even becomes more serious, then investment activities in different areas may be not in sync anymore, but still we have to continuously run a business no matter what would happen. We are in the West, if you will, and then we need to run the business in the context of network on the West side of the world. Still, we had a relationship with the great business leaders in China. There are still great entrepreneurs and business leaders in China.
To be very blunt with you, we look to work with them, but we need to focus on the immediate priority. I cannot answer to a question easily, but we have to continuously make an effort to maximize our corporate value under the circumstances. Any other questions, please? The second row from the front. Kagashima from Kyodo Tsushin relates to the previous question. This fiscal year business focus, performance focus, or the Stargate focus-wise, what is the biggest risk you are expecting? For the tariff, I believe that you said that it may not have a large impact on the Stargate project, but what is the biggest risk from your understanding at this moment?
As a SoftBank Group overall, from the tariff point of view, I do not believe many portfolio companies may be negatively impacted from the tariff.
I may need to address a little bit if there is any from the tariff point of view. When you look at the full year as an investment company and try for the performance of investment activities, we have a large portfolio, and growth in the big portfolio is one of the risks. For example, Arm is one of the biggest portfolios. So asset value of Arm may be negatively impacted for many reasons. That can be one of the risks for our investment performance. Also, if the business performance of the large investment can be another risk, for example, we are going to make a big investment in OpenAI. If there is any at all for the damage to the value of the business, that's going to be another risk for us as an investment company. Jason, can you comment about the tariff impact on business?
Yes.
Regarding tariffs, as Goto-san said, it's a very, very dynamic situation. As of right now, tariffs do not apply to design or design services, which is what Arm provides. It's only on the end product. There is some discussion that there may be tariffs on the actual chips, which could have impact. Of course, today we provide designs for chips. We do not actually sell full chips. I think it remains to be seen exactly how the tariff situation plays out. I would say as it relates to Stargate, there is a lot of partnership between, I know, SoftBank and Arm and all the different parts of the portfolio with the U.S. government on that project. I would expect that whatever tariff policy is decided would probably not be detrimental to the overall project, but we will see. Thank you.
For Vision Fund, Navneet, do you have any comments about the tariff impact to the Vision Fund and Vision Fund activity itself?
Yes, sure. In terms of tariffs, it really depends on three factors: the level, duration, and the type of tariffs. The first two are relatively easily understandable, but the latter matters more to us as most tariffs are on physical goods. If you look at the Vision Fund investments that we have made, about 500 or so investments over the last eight years, the majority of our investments are what we call high-value assets, companies like ByteDance, Coupang, DD, PayPay, Revolut, Klarna. They are IP-heavy but asset-light by nature of being AI native. The net of all of this is that there is very limited impact of the tariffs on our portfolio companies. Thank you.
We are going to take questions from online participants. Please make sure you turn off a live stream other than this Zoom connection to avoid echoing. Again, if you are on Zoom Japanese, please ask questions in Japanese. First, Sato-san from Nikkei Asia. Can you hear my voice? Thank you, Sato-san. The first question is about OpenAI. Whether an event stipulated in terms and agreement is going to take place or not, you will see, you said. I wonder whether OpenAI explained to you where they would go. Yes, talking about reorganization. Of course, our conversation is based on the assumption that reorganization would take place. There are different stakeholders, however, and some people may intervene in this project, and this may not go as smooth as we hope. It is out of our control.
We are just wait and see what will happen, not really just on a negative term but positive term. Since the announcement of OpenAI in April, sorry, may you still remain in close relationship with OpenAI? Yes. Our second question is about Ampere, Graphcore, and Sphere. You acquired 8,000 talents or engineers. Going forward, not only CPU, but the processors or AI semiconductors, you want to expand the area. That is why. So 8,000 semiconductor engineers, do you have all parts in place to expand the areas? Most of the engineers are Arm engineers. Not only CPU, but also you want to increase the number of engineers for processors in the area. Jason-san, could you elaborate on that, your direction?
In terms of the capabilities, certainly within the SoftBank portfolio, Arm obviously provides significant capability across the design side for CPU, GPU, MPU technologies.
Certainly, Ampere is a great partner, a company that we actually have had an investment in. Ampere is unique. It is a team of ex-engineers that came from Intel that had a lot of experience taping out world-class and developing world-class server and server chips previously on x86. They then brought that technology to Arm. They actually taped out at least five different server chips on Arm. That was certainly because of the partnership that Arm has had with them, that was a great acquisition that we have a lot of synergies with. In terms of Graphcore, they are a company that has a history of building GPU or NPU accelerator products. They have taped out a number of products over the years and have also had a lot of success in that area.
That is an area that Arm has not worked in in the past. I would say there is very much a high synergy or complementary aspect across all three companies. In terms of capabilities to address the opportunities for Stargate, there definitely is from a CPU and possibly beyond, but no products have been announced thus far. Certainly, lots of capabilities have been created. Thank you. Thank you. Just to make sure I understood correctly the translation. The number of current semiconductor engineers is enough to have a capability for AI semiconductor in the future. Is my understanding correct? To actually completely get to a full tape-out and development of a chip, there typically is a large design capability. I would say we have most of the capability across certainly those three companies.
In terms of being able to typically get to the more complex chips, it requires working with others, typically ASIC or application-specific integrated circuit providers. I would say the combination of the technology in-house as well as some of the different partners that Arm, I think Graphcore, and I know Ampere all work with, I would say the capability is largely either in-house or under contract. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Next question. Mr. Masuno from Nomura Securities, please unmute and start your question. This is Masuno speaking. I have two questions. One is about Robo Holdings. Looking at the robot has been focused very much. There are several robot activities there, and this time SBG, 10 out of SoftBank Group and six from the Vision Fund to set up the Robo Holdings.
Mainly, SoftBank Group is going to be the shareholder, which is a good structure and very interesting as well. I am excited to see the rapid movements here. For the robotics, I believe that mainly held by and what is the background at why that holding company is becoming the main player for this robotics and robotics investments? Thank you for your question. Robo Holdings is a very important challenge for us. As for robotics, actually, we have been actually addressing this robotics for the past 10 years or so. There are several portfolio companies which have the robotics expertise. Along with the AI development, robotics is going to be developed at the same pace, I believe, and the services in the market, including people's working styles, lifestyles, are going to be changed. That is very visible. Especially, robotics is very visible from that sense.
Many preparations have been done. Things have not been fully discussed here, but hopefully that you can be looking forward to. The master and ourselves are going to be directly involved in these robotics activities. Thank you. Personally, I believe it can be the same size of the business as Vision Fund. I am very much expecting on that. My second question is about the investment, the objective of investing in OpenAI. My understanding is that you would like to long hold the OpenAI by SVG for the future strategy and future expectations. Making a loan to Vision Fund from SVG and the Vision Fund, not only that, but also having the master's individual guarantee, that was very surprising to me. I thought that it should be done by the SVG itself.
Is it because to make the better performance for Vision Fund, for making the Vision Fund as an investor for OpenAI? Thank you for your question. This is something that we have an internal discussion very seriously, and we have decided to make the Vision Fund as an investor. The logic is because Vision Fund has been the investor for OpenAI for the last phase, and that's understating as this is the minority investment. Also, many investors were participating in this financial round. At the same time, they have a clear roadmap to the monetization. That is why we have decided to use Vision Fund. The loans, master's part, we would like to maintain the framework of Vision Fund too as much as possible.
At the same time, because the amount is large, we would like to utilize intercompany loan instead of preferred share so that we'll be able to get the return back faster. Still, there is a remainder for the investment amount, which is also not small. We would like to have a discussion internally so that we can decide. I think it's too stretching to depend on master's personal guarantee. We are not depending on that. Because of the structure from Vision Fund 2, we maintain the same structure for Vision Fund 2 to make this investment. That is why the approach becomes this way. Understood. Thank you very much. We would like to conclude the Q&A. Thank you very much. The SoftBank Group corporate earnings results announcement for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2025, is now closed.
The video footage of this meeting will be distributed on demand from our corporate website. Thank you very much once again for joining the SoftBank Group corporate earnings results announcement for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2025.