SoftBank (SFTBY +4.84%) has spent nearly $3 billion repurchasing shares since the end of March when it announced shareholder-friendly moves to shore up cash and buyback stocks.
In a press release, the Japanese tech stock said that as of March 31, it has acquired 71,536,700 of its shares, paying 311.7 billion yen or $2.9 billion. The company plans to purchase a total of 145,000,000 shares spending a maximum of 500 billion yen and has already completed nearly 60% of purchases. The share repurchase program runs through March 15, 2021.
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Struggling with mounting losses in its Vision Technology fund and facing pressure from shareholders, SoftBank announced at the end of March it was engaging in a massive restructuring program to raise capital and silence critics, including $41 billion in asset sales and $18 billion in share repurchases. That's in addition to the $4.8 billion in buybacks the company announced earlier in March.
Since that announcement, SoftBank reported a nearly $18 billion loss for its Vision Fund in the fiscal year ended March 31. The losses were largely due to writedowns of its investments in WeWork and Uber Technologies. SoftBank said at the time that Uber represented $5.2 billion of the losses while WeWork contributed $4.6 billion. The rest of its investments made up the remaining $7.5 billion of losses. Last month SoftBank announced plans to sell a stake in its Japanese wireless holdings.
