Japan-based investor SoftBank on Wednesday said its valuation loss of $1.4 billion (around Rs 9,000 crore) in the 2016-’17 financial year was mainly because of its investments in Indian firms Snapdeal and Ola. “Loss on financial instruments at fair value through profit or loss was ¥160,419 million (approximately Rs 9,000 crore) as compared to a gain of ¥114,377 million (around Rs 7,000 crore) in the previous fiscal,” SoftBank said in a filing.
Currency fluctuations and market dynamics had also contributed to the loss. “The valuation of our financial investments are frequently adjusted upwards or downwards due to accounting policies, currency fluctuations and market dynamics. The loss reported in today’s earnings represents the aggregate impact of such revaluations during the course of the entire fiscal,” a company spokesperson said, according to The Economic Times.
The fair value of Snapdeal and Ola’s stocks fell drastically between March 2016 and March 2017. SoftBank had written down $555 million (approximately Rs 3,692 crore) in Jasper Infotech and ANI Technologies – the two parent companies of Snapdeal and Ola, respectively – for the six months that ended in September 30 last year, reported Moneycontrol. The Japanese firm had also invested around $2 billion (Rs 13,000 crore) in multiple internet ventures in India.
This comes at a time when SoftBank is planning to sell Snapdeal to rival e-commerce major Flipkart to cut down its losses. In 2014, the Japanese firm had chosen to invest in Snapdeal over Flipkart and Paytm. “The highly competitive e-commerce market in India has made a trend of the company’s business performance lower than initially anticipated,” SoftBank had said earlier about Snapdeal, according to The Economic Times.
Despite the losses, SoftBank’s operating profit jumped 13% to ¥1.03 trillion (approximately Rs 59,000 crore) because of cost cutting measures and an increased subscriber base, reported Mint. It is the second-best annual profit that the Japanese multinational telecommunications and internet corporation has reported.
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