Activist investor Elliott rebuilds SoftBank stake: Rpts.

Shares of SoftBank Group (9984.T, SFTBY) are jumping after the Financial Times reported activist investor Elliott Management has rebuilt a stake worth more than $2 billion in the Japanese tech conglomerate. The firm is reportedly pushing for a share buyback and has already engaged with the company's leadership. Elliott last took a substantial stake in the company back in 2020.

Yahoo Finance's Akiko Fujita reports on why Elliott is engaging with SoftBank again.

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This post was written by Stephanie Mikulich.

Video transcript

We are watching soft bank shares this morning, after the Financial Times reporting that Elliot Management rebuilt a substantial stake in the Japanese technology company Elliot, also reportedly lobbying for $15 billion worth of share buyback from the firm.

Let's bring in a fit with the details here.

Oh, this is a really big deal for both firms that we're talking about here, particularly given the push that we've seen previously from Elliott regarding these buybacks as well.

What do we know?

Yeah, no question about that.

You talked to the stock move that we saw from Soft Bank on the back that we saw a shares overnight in Tokyo.

Trade also jumped roughly 5% on the back of this news.

The Financial Times reporting that Elliot Management Stake in Soft Bank is worth roughly $2 billion and the activist investor, according to The Financial Times, has already spoken directly with senior management over at Soft Bank over the last several months.

Specifically, as you noted, pushing to a company to launch $15 billion share buy back with the belief that will deliver an immediate boost to Softbank's share price.

Now, all of this, of course, comes at a time when we've seen that gap between the value of soft banks combined asset and its market valuation widen and the company is coming off of a string of losses.

That prompted founder Ma Shon to go into what he described as defence mode selling off some of its key holdings, including stakes in Doordash as well as grab shares of Soft Bank Group, though are up roughly 50% year to date.

The 90% stake in arm certainly been a big boost to soft banks, specifically in the performance of that stock.

Since the IP O has helped lift soft banks net asset value to 100 $80 billion that is double that from a year ago and soft bank now, reportedly looking to go all in on a I as well as semiconductors, uh, with a cash pile that totaled 6.2 trillion yen at the end of the fiscal year.

So Elliot, uh, potentially looking to kind of position themselves right as soft bank is looking to ramp up his investments as well.

As you noted, this isn't the first time that Elliott has taken a stake in Soft Bank.

The activist fund took a $2.5 billion stake back in 2020 but sold down most of its stake by early 2022 after losing confidence in son's ability to close that valuation gap, at least according to the FT. All right, Akiko, thanks so much for bringing us the news on these companies really appreciate it.