"SoftBank in crisis amid record losses" by Ben Dooley New York Times, May 18, 2020
TOKYO — His flagship tech fund is losing money. His company just posted billions in losses, and a key ally, Chinese technology mogul Jack Ma, stepped aside.
Still, Masayoshi Son, the exuberant chief executive of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, mustered another spirited defense of his troubled empire Monday, shifting from contrite to brash and back again in a performance that sought to both reassure investors and restore his own bruised reputation.
Son’s earnings presentation came just hours after the company announced that Ma, co-founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, had resigned from its board. That news was quickly followed by an earnings report describing losses that were the largest on record not just for SoftBank, but for any listed Japanese company ever, according to NHK, the public broadcaster.
The company reported an annual operating loss of 1.36 trillion yen, or $12.7 billion, in the fiscal year that ended March 31, its first annual loss in 15 years. It reported a profit of $19.6 billion during the same period last year.
The dismal results were driven largely by SoftBank’s investment in WeWork, the office space company, and Uber, as well as poor showings by other technology-related companies that have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
Some haven't, like Amazon and Microsoft, and some have Zoomed.
Investors had been bracing for the results. The company had released two earnings warnings, telling markets to expect that its $100 billion Vision Fund — an investment vehicle that became a major finance force in the technology world — would post losses on the order of $16.7 billion.
The company’s losses were slightly higher than its estimates, and the Vision Fund reported a loss of $17.7 billion, greater than predicted.
With the pandemic in mind, the company joined other major corporations in declining to forecast its earnings for the coming fiscal year, noting that because of the virus “it remains difficult to forecast the medium-term impact on the company’s business and financial results.”
During his presentation, Son refused to be drawn out about Ma’s departure, saying that it was a decision Ma had made on his own and that the two men “will remain friends for the rest of our lives.” Last year, Ma retired as executive chairman of Alibaba, saying that he would pull back from his business endeavors to focus on philanthropy.
Through the Vision Fund, financed in part with money from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, Son has pumped enormous amounts of capital into cutting-edge and often risky startups, companies that he believes have the potential to effectively monopolize entire industries.
The coronavirus has threatened to destroy Son’s dream. It has drained huge amounts of value from SoftBank’s portfolio of companies, like Uber and Oyo, the Indian hospitality company, which have proved particularly susceptible to the pandemic’s effects.
Unbowed, Son has doubled down on himself. Last month, SoftBank said it would sell down $41 billion of its assets to increase its cash reserves and finance an ambitious plan to buy back $23 billion worth of its own shares and shore up its falling stock price.
In a separate announcement Monday, SoftBank said that it would spend $4.7 billion toward that goal by the end of March 2021, doubling the amount it had already pledged in March of this year.
The money to finance it, Son confirmed during his presentation, came in part from sales of the company’s position in Alibaba.
Shares of SoftBank closed up nearly 3 percent Monday.
For a minute there I thought there was something to worry about.
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What is strange is Japan was one of the last to lockdown (right after Olympics were cancelled) and earliest to reopen, and one of the countries least affected. The countries that locked down hardest -- Western Europe and the U.S. -- were the ones hardest hit. Hmmmm.
"Researchers ponder why US and Europe are harder hit than Asia" by Simon Denyer and Joel Achenbach Washington Post, May 28, 2020
TOKYO — It is one of the many mysteries of the coronavirus pandemic: Why has the death toll from COVID-19 apparently been lower in Asia than in Western Europe and North America?
I just told you.
China, where the virus emerged late last year in Wuhan, has recorded fewer than 5,000 deaths, which translates to three deaths per million inhabitants. Japan has around seven per million, Pakistan six, South Korea and Indonesia five, India three, and Thailand fewer than one per million. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Mongolia say they have recorded zero COVID-19-related deaths.
Compare that with about 100 deaths per million in Germany, about 180 in Canada, nearly 300 in the United States, and more than 500 in Britain, Italy, and Spain.
Scientists at Japan’s Chiba University plotted the trajectory of the virus across the world and said they noticed stark regional disparities. The baseline assumption, at the moment, is that the virus — officially SARS-CoV-2 — mutates the way all viruses do and is just as innately contagious and lethal in one part of the world as in another.
With that mutation goes Bill Gates' dream.
Part of the reason for the high number of deaths in the United States and Western Europe may lie in an initial reluctance to react to an epidemic that seemed distant and unthreatening. In Asia, meanwhile, previous experience with the SARS and MERS epidemics enabled much faster responses to the new threat.
Taiwan, for example, has been widely praised for its speedy response to the epidemic, including early screening of air passengers from Wuhan. South Korea built a massive program of testing, tracing, and isolating patients, but in Japan and India, two very different countries, the relatively low death toll has baffled many scientists. Similar mysteries have emerged from Pakistan to the Philippines.
Hot and humid weather could be a factor in places such as Cambodia and Singapore. Several studies have suggested that heat and humidity can slow, although not stop, the spread of the virus, just as is seen with influenza and coronaviruses that cause common colds, but some equatorial countries, like Ecuador and Brazil, have seen many cases and deaths linked to the virus.
I will have to get down to South America soon, and we have been told up here the virus won't burn off -- meaning it will.
We have been lied to the whole time, with the cold-and-flu season weaponized into a tool of fear for evil politicians and their $tring-pullers.
Demographics also play a role in regional disparities. Africa’s generally younger population may have been more resistant than northern Italy’s older communities, for example.
That is where the damn thing originated, or haven't you heard?
In Japan, which has the world’s oldest population, different reasons are being explored.
There is a widespread belief in Japan that good hygiene and habits, like wearing masks and avoiding handshakes, helped slow the spread of the virus, while universal health care and the country’s emphasis on protecting the elderly may have lowered the death toll.
Yeah, strange how their elderly didn't croak in the wave of COVID-19.
Did some governments -- Sweden, Belarus -- flip their finger at the New World Order?
They seem to be better off for it.
Research by a team at Cambridge University showed how the virus mutated as it left East Asia and traveled to Europe, noting the possibility that the initial strain may have been ‘‘immunologically or environmentally adapted to a large section of the East Asian population’’ and needed to mutate to overcome resistance outside that region.
I'm thinking bioweapon now, readers.
Other specialists have said the significance of emergent strains remains unclear.
Different immune responses could also play a role.
‘‘Our hypothesis is that Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccination, plus infection or exposure to TB, would be protective,’’ said Tsuyoshi Miyakawa of Fujita Health University, but Japan has a record of BCG vaccination similar to that of France and yet a very different COVID-19 mortality rate.
Look like a conspiracy theory to me!
Specialists are divided, but clinical trials are underway.....
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The Japanese seem to be allied with the French this time, and that never works out well:
French Failed to Contain COVID-19
"France has reported more than 3,000 new daily virus infections in the biggest such one-day rise in more than three weeks, and the first major increase since France started gradually reopening May 11. The new figure was not included in the government’s daily virus press release Thursday night, but was put on a government virus tracking website. The national public health agency and Health Ministry did not provide a reason for the rise Friday. It comes as testing has become more easily available in France, though it is unclear whether that is part of the reason. The French government has gradually increased the number of tests it is conducting after widespread criticism early in the pandemic that it was not testing widely enough. Scattered virus outbreaks have been reported since France’s reopening began, notably in some schools that were subsequently shut down."
Better get back behind the Maginot Line.
Meanwhile, the Japanese juggernaut continues its sweep through Southeast Asia:
"Singapore has sentenced a drug suspect to death on the popular videoconferencing app Zoom because of the city-state’s lockdown, in a move slammed by a human rights group as callous and inhumane. Defense lawyer Peter Fernando said the Supreme Court announced the penalty to his client, Punithan Genasan from Malaysia, in a virtual hearing Friday. Genasan was in jail, while Fernando and prosecutors participated in the hearing from different locations. A Supreme Court spokesperson said courts have been conducting hearings and delivering judgments remotely to minimize the spread of the virus. The spokesperson confirmed Genasan’s case was the first ‘‘where a death sentence was pronounced by remote hearing in Singapore.” The Singapore court ruled that Genasan, 37, was involved in drug trafficking in October 2011. Court documents said the judge found he recruited two drug couriers and directed them to transport and deliver 28.5 grams of heroin."
Really got his butt in a sling, huh?
"The number of coronavirus cases in Indonesia has surpassed 25,000 with more than 1,500 virus-related deaths as authorities plan to lift large-scale social restrictions next week. Indonesia’s COVID-19 Task Force on Friday reported 678 new cases in the last 24 hours, taking the country’s total to 25,216 with 1,520 deaths, the highest death toll in Southeast Asia. It also reported 6,492 recoveries. Jakarta, the first large city to enforce partial lockdown rules in the country, has hinted that the restriction policy would not be extended after June 4. The State-Owned Enterprises Ministry has instructed state-run companies to allow its employees to return to work in mid-June by observing health guidelines amid a surge in cases and fears of a new wave of infections."
Time to sweep north:
"In a cramped office in eastern Seoul, Hwang Seungwon points a remote control toward a huge NASA-like overhead screen stretching across one of the walls. With each flick of the control, a colorful array of pie charts, graphs, and maps reveals the search habits of thousands of South Korean senior citizens being monitored by voice-enabled “smart” speakers, an experimental remote care service the company says is increasingly needed during the coronavirus crisis. “We closely monitor for signs of danger, whether they are more frequently using search words that indicate rising states of loneliness or insecurity,” said Hwang, director of a social enterprise that handles SK Telecom’s services. Trigger words lead to a recommendation for a visit by public health officials."
Better retreat to the homeland:
"Nissan Motor Co. reported a 671 billion yen ($6.2 billion) net loss for the latest fiscal year, the first loss in a decade and the biggest in 20 years. A four-year turnaround plan calls for production to be cut by 20 percent to about 5.4 million vehicles a year, and includes the closing of Nissan’s Barcelona plant in addition to one it is shuttering in Indonesia."
The Imperial War Machine is falling apart, and you know what happens to You know what happens to the Japanese leadership after the end of war, right?
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"In Paris, among those calling for a demonstration was the family of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black man who died in custody in 2016 after being tackled and pinned down by police in the Paris suburbs. La Vérité Pour Adama, or “the truth for Adama,” an advocacy group led by Traoré’s sister, Assa, said Floyd’s death was a chilling reminder of Traoré’s."
Where are the Yellow Vests?
"Students in Tokyo started to return to school Monday, with fitness gyms, saunas, and cinemas among businesses reopening in the capital after nearly two months under a lockdown. Japan has been slowly reopening economic activity after a state of emergency was lifted nationwide last week. Schools in the capital are resuming, albeit with staggered student attendance, for the first time in about three months, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for their closure at the end of February."
