Softbank Sells Entire $3.6 Billion Nvidia Investment

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By Andrew E. Freedman
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Nvidia suffered a blow today as SoftBank's Vision Fund announced that it sold the entirety of its $3.63 billion investment in the chip-maker.

SoftBank was one of Nvidia's largest investors, but it dumped its share on January 10 the investment group said in its Q3 earnings for its fiscal year 2019. It was a little over 39.8 billion yen on Dec. 31, or just over $3.6 billion.

This is another financial hitch for Nvidia, which lowered its Q4 revenue guidance late last month citing "deteriorating" economic conditions in China, as well as some hitches in sales of its new RTX cards. CNBC reports that it lost almost half of its value in the past four months. Analysts have also warned that Nvidia may still be facing some cryptocurrency headwinds.

Nvidia isn't the only tech stock that has suggested weakness in China could be an issue going forward. Apple also cut its fiscal 2019 Q1 revenue projection on January 2, partially due to lower than expected iPhone sales and challenges in China.

SoftBank's Vision Fund includes investments in a number of other tech companies, including Uber, WeWork, Arm Holdings and Slack.

As of this writing, Nvidia's stock is up almost 3 percent.

Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @FreedmanAE

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28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jaber2
    I got out of Nvidia is April when the stock was at $240 by selling all my Nvidia cards and mining rigs, I am no hedge fund manager but I saw this coming
    Reply
  • Blitz Hacker
    Just buy it!! lol :)
    Reply
  • Dantte
    oooo, thats going to leave a mark!
    Reply
  • derekullo
    So with the stock up 3% they lost a potential gain of 3.6 billion x 0.03 or 108 million dollars.

    On the other side AMD is up 18% since January 10 giving them a potential gain of 648 million had they reinvested it in AMD.

    If I am reading this right since AMD has a market cap of 23.47B then this hypothetical 3.6B investment would be more than 10% of the company.
    Reply
  • DookieDraws
    I don't care if it's NVIDIA, or who ever, but when you overprice your products, it's going to be hard to sell them. Makes perfect sense to me! And I believe most will agree, NVIDIA's latest GPUs are simply overpriced. It would do them good to slash those prices soon. But hey, what does some guy who goes by the name of DookieDraws, know? :P
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    21747445 said:
    I don't care if it's NVIDIA, or who ever, but when you overprice your products, it's going to be hard to sell them. Makes perfect sense to me! And I believe most will agree, NVIDIA's latest GPUs are simply overpriced. It would do them good to slash those prices soon. But hey, what does some guy who goes by the name of DookieDraws, know? :P

    Poor competition doesn't help but the reality is the consumer market is not where the margins are. Thats HPC. They make more per Quadro or Tesla sold than they do Geforce by far.
    Reply
  • dimar
    Here in Canada $2600 Asus HDR 4K G-sync screen + for $2000 2080 Ti. This is way out of hand.
    Reply
  • DookieDraws
    21747893 said:
    Here in Canada $2600 Asus HDR 4K G-sync screen + for $2000 2080 Ti. This is way out of hand.

    Prayers sent! :P
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    21747893 said:
    Here in Canada $2600 Asus HDR 4K G-sync screen + for $2000 2080 Ti. This is way out of hand.
    Well yeah, if you look at the single most expensive model of the most expensive consumer GPU and gaming monitor on the market, it's going to cost a lot...
    Reply
  • s1mon7
    I sold my stock the day Turing launched and if I did so a few days later I'd lose money. The public reasons that Nvidia provided for crashing are nice to muddy the waters and I understand that if they flat-out admitted that it's because Turing failed, they'd see even fewer Turing sales and that would be all over the tech news. CPU sales are higher than ever, yet GPUs are failing when PC gaming and GPU compute are more popular than ever, what could it be though, I wonder!

    The reality is that the majority of people don't need new GPUs - they upgrade when there's a good opportunity. Sort of like there is a good opportunity in the CPU market with Ryzen and the core count increases by Intel. Nvidia does not provide such products. They thought that in the times of limited competition they can get away with whatever they please, they released Turing, and found out that people not wanting to buy any GPU if the best options are so weak is a factor as well. That translates to their business customers as well - if their Pascal-based cards are almost as good and they'd have to invest a lot for smaller than ever performance-per-watt gains, what's the point?

    Nvidia isn't selling because they're not offering any substantial performance progress. That means they don't have anything that people want to buy at this point, even if they had the vast majority of the market to themselves. If a 3 or 4 year old GPU is pretty much as great as the new offerings, why bother? We were all off-put when Turing launched, and there's no reason to believe it doesn't translate to the casual observers as well.
    Reply