Vision Fund loss slashes Masayoshi Son’s 2020 salary by 52%

SoftBank Group founder and CEO Masayoshi Son’s salary more than halved last year, according to the group’s regulatory filing on May 28.

The filing showed that Son’s salary last year was 100 million yen ($0.9 million), down by 52% from 209 million yen ($1.9 million) in 2019 and the lowest among the group’s eight top executives.

Among the eight, Simon Segars, the chief executive of ARM Holdings, had the highest salary  in 2020 with 1.88 billion yen ($17.1 million). Last September the group agreed to sell ARM, a UK-based semiconductor company, to NVIDIA Corp. of the US for $40 billion.

Analysts say that the drastic cut in Son’s salary in 2020 must have been largely due to the Vision Fund’s large-scale loss in 2019.

SoftBank Group in the 2019 financial year posted a net loss of 961.5 billion yen ($8.7 billion) on investment losses of its venture capital unit Vision Fund.

On the other hand, in its filing today the group posted net profit of 4.99 trillion yen ($45.3 billion) for financial year 2020, the largest figure ever posted in Japan’s corporate history. Accordingly, Son’s salary is expected to see a big rebound this year.

Reflecting the strong performance, SoftBank Group’s stock price has leapt from 3,675 yen ($33.39) per share on the first day of April last year to 8,388 yen ($76.22) on May 28 this year.

Son owns 22.1% of SoftBank Group’s shares.

Write to Yeong-hyo Jeong at hugh@hankyung.com
Daniel Cho edited this article.