The logo of SoftBank is displayed at a company shop in Tokyo, Japan January 28, 2025.
Issei Kato | Reuters
Shares of SoftBank Group plunged nearly 9% on Friday, marking its third straight day of selloff after the Japanese giant said it had sold its entire stake in U.S. chip giant Nvidia for $5.83 billion.
The stock pared losses to trade 5% lower as of 9 p.m. ET. If the losses hold, this would mark the second straight week of selloff after the conglomerate saw almost $50 billion in market cap wiped out last week, marking its worst weekly loss since March 2020.
“The sell-off of SoftBank today is less idiosyncratic to SoftBank, and more driven by broader market sentiment on semiconductors and technology stocks,” said Rolf Bulk, a senior equity analyst at New Street Research.
“In that context and with SoftBank’s holding discount still very low vs. historic averages, SoftBank trading down 5-6% today does not surprise me.”
SoftBank disclosed in its latest earnings that it offloaded 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October and scaled back its T-Mobile stake, bringing in $9.17 billion.
Although the Nvidia sale surprised some investors, it isn’t the first time SoftBank has exited the U.S. chip giant. Its Vision Fund had accumulated roughly $4 billion worth of Nvidia shares in 2017 before selling out entirely in early 2019.
Even so, SoftBank continues to have business ties to Nvidia. The Tokyo-based company is involved in a number of AI ventures that use Nvidia’s technology, including the $500 billion Stargate project for data centers in the U.S.
Several other tech stocks in the region also declined. Semiconductor testing equipment maker Advantest and Tokyo Electron, a chip production equipment maker, fell by over 3% and 4% respectively.
Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, fell 2.04%. South Korean memory chip giant SK Hynix was more than 5% lower, while Samsung Electronics lost 3.8%.
Shares of Tencent declined 5.61%, while JD.com was down 4.31%.
Overnight in the U.S., technology giants came away battered. Nvidia and Broadcom notably declined 3.6% and 4.3%, respectively, while Google parent Alphabet fell 2.8%.
