SoftBank's Balance-Sheet Ballet: Selling Lenskart While Borrowing a Trillion Yen for OpenAI
Published on 08/26/2026 at 03:51 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The optics are almost contradictory. On Tuesday, SoftBank's stock climbed 3.1 percent to €27.77, a welcome rebound after Monday's close at €26.94. Yet strip away the daily noise, and the picture turns sobering: the shares are down 8.0 percent on the week and 4.6 percent over the past month, with annualized volatility of 75 percent underscoring just how much the market is swinging between conviction and caution over Masayoshi Son's AI ambitions.
That tension is playing out inside the company's treasury as much as in its share price. SoftBank is simultaneously shedding assets that no longer fit its strategy and borrowing at record scale to fund the ones that do. The latest example came yesterday, when subsidiary SVF II Lightbulb sold its entire stake in Indian eyewear chain Lenskart Solutions through block trades — 2.58 percent of the company, roughly 4.5 million shares, for about ?2,887.87 crore. Small in the context of a portfolio valued in trillions of yen, but symptomatic of a broader pattern: every liquid position is now being tested against a single, overriding priority.
That priority is OpenAI. SoftBank has committed over $60 billion to the AI developer, including a $30 billion stake announced in February that is being paid in three tranches through October. To finance those pledges, the group is preparing its largest-ever bond issuance: a trillion-yen offering, approximately $6.3 billion, set to be priced on September 4 with a coupon in the 4.30–4.90 percent range. The seven-year notes would mark the biggest single-issuer bond sale in Japan's corporate market.
From Venture Vehicle to Infrastructure Financier
The Lenskart divestment is a telling piece of a larger transformation. SoftBank once made its name placing venture bets on young tech companies through the Vision Fund — Lenskart was precisely that kind of holding. Today, the conglomerate is repositioning itself as a financier of the physical infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence: data centers, cloud capacity, and stakes in the model developers themselves.
The group is building out a new entity called SB Neo for its neocloud business in the US, alongside the Infrinia AI Cloud OS — software for AI data centers, already in beta in Japan — targeted for the fiscal year 2027. The recent earnings report from telecom subsidiary SoftBank Corp., delivered just over three weeks ago and followed by a 10.4 percent share-price decline, was only one chapter in this story.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SoftBank Group?
The strategic pivot extends to Arm Holdings, the chip-design subsidiary in which SoftBank holds a majority stake. On August 21, Arm announced plans to enter the fabless semiconductor business, developing and selling its own data-center processors under the banner of "Agentic General Intelligence" CPUs. Meta, Oracle, and OpenAI have been named as early or potential customers. At the shareholder meeting, Son reiterated that Arm should become a leading global CPU provider, arguing that AI computing architecture is shifting toward CPU-centric systems.
For Arm, this represents a fundamental shift from its current model of earning licensing fees and royalties on chip designs — a high-margin but indirect business — to direct competition with established processor vendors. The move requires manufacturing partnerships, capital, and time before announcements translate into revenue. For SoftBank, the stakes are existential: whether Arm's strategic gamble succeeds will help determine whether the group's massive debt load can be refinanced on favorable terms.
The Balance Sheet Tells a Story of Discipline — So Far
The financial picture, at least on paper, suggests the group is operating with more prudence than its reputation for spectacular failures might imply. The pro-forma net asset value stood at ¥58.3 trillion in early August, with ¥31.1 trillion of that coming from the Arm stake alone. The loan-to-value ratio sits at 13 percent, well below the group's self-imposed normal threshold of 25 percent. A cash position of ¥2.3 trillion covers more than two years of bond maturities, according to the company.
S&P Global Ratings acknowledged this constitution in July, upgrading its outlook on SoftBank from negative to stable while affirming the BB+ rating. The agency cited a record net asset value of ¥72.3 trillion as of June 30 and the strong performance of Arm's share price. The most recent quarterly results add further support: for the first fiscal quarter of 2026, SoftBank reported net income of ¥1.83 trillion, comfortably beating consensus estimates, buoyed by valuation gains on its OpenAI and Intel positions.
There are, however, reasons for caution. The immediate market reaction to the trillion-yen bond announcement was a 5.3 percent drop in Tokyo, as investors weighed rising leverage against the long payback period of AI infrastructure investments. Arm's fabless entry remains an announcement rather than a completed business — no supply contracts have been confirmed, only prospective customers named. And in the second quarter of 2026, SoftBank sold roughly 71.5 percent of its TSMC position, reallocating into Capital One — a signal that even the conglomerate is reweighting its chip supply-chain exposure.
Two Dates That Will Test the Market's Patience
The next concrete milestones are the bond pricing on September 4 and the actual issuance on September 17. If the coupon lands at the upper end of the indicative range, or if Arm fails to show tangible customer commitments by then, the skepticism of recent weeks could harden into something more durable.
For now, the market appears willing to tolerate the debt load as a calculated growth risk — provided Arm delivers credible customer wins and the valuation gains from OpenAI and Intel persist. The Lenskart sale, minor in itself, fits into a larger narrative: SoftBank is liquidating whatever doesn't serve its singular focus on financing the AI infrastructure of the coming decade. Whether that focus represents disciplined conviction or overextended ambition is a question the September bond pricing will begin to answer.
Ad
SoftBank Group Stock: New Analysis - 26 August
Fresh SoftBank Group information released. What's the impact for investors? Our latest independent report examines recent figures and market trends.
