Key Highlights
- Record revenue achieved for ninth consecutive year
- 13% YoY increase in operating income and 8% YoY increase in net income
- Mid-term Plan targets for revenue and operating income achieved one year ahead of schedule
- Aiming for record-high sales and profits in FY2025, including 1 trillion JPY in operating income while investing for growth
On May 8, 2025, SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434) President & CEO Junichi Miyakawa presented earnings results for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 (FY2024). At the press conference held in Tokyo, Miyakawa began with a review of SoftBank’s consolidated results for the full year.
In FY2024, revenue (6,544.3 billion JPY), operating income (989.0 billion JPY), and net income (526.1 billion JPY) increased year-on-year (YoY) by 8%, 13% and 8%, respectively.
The results were mainly attributable to increased revenues and profits across all of SoftBank’s business segments (Consumer, Enterprise, Distribution, Media & EC and Financial), a continued increase in mobile revenues in the Consumer segment, higher profits in the Financial segment driven by PayPay – which achieved over 30 billion JPY of operating income – and a significant increase in profit at the Media & EC segment.
FY2025 forecasts for revenue, operating income and net income revised upward
Miyakawa noted that the Mid-term Management Plan (Mid-term Plan) targets for both revenue and operating income were achieved one year ahead of schedule. Accordingly, SoftBank upwardly revised its FY2025 targets for revenue by 200 billion JPY to 6,700 billion JPY (to achieve record high revenue for the 10th consecutive year), and operating income by 30 billion JPY to 1 trillion JPY or more. He noted that this upward revision to operating income is being done while making growth investments in generative AI and other areas.
The net income forecast for FY2025 was also revised upward by 5 billion JPY to 540 billion JPY. While aiming for these record-high profits, Miyakawa said the annual dividend payment of 8.6 JPY per share is expected to continue.
1 million smartphone subscriber net additions achieved, positive trend of migration to ‘SoftBank’ mobile service brand takes hold
Reviewing the highlights of SoftBank’s business segments, Miyakawa noted that in the Consumer segment, in line with the Mid-term Plan target, SoftBank achieved 1 million net additions of smartphone subscribers in FY2024, further expanding its smartphone subscription base to 31.77 million. The trend of more conversions from SoftBank’s ‘Y!mobile’ brand to its ‘SoftBank’ brand also continued, contributing to higher customer revenues.
Double-digit growth in Enterprise solutions achieved
The Enterprise segment registered 922.4 billion JPY of revenue in FY2024, and 437.2 billion JPY was attributable to business solutions and other revenue, which increased by 27% YoY. Double-digit growth will be pursued in FY2025 as well.
PayPay consolidated operating income up significantly
The Financial segment saw a major profit contribution from PayPay, which registered 45.6 billion JPY in consolidated EBITDA and over 30 billion JPY in consolidated operating income. Profitable for two consecutive years, PayPay is now preparing for an IPO. Accordingly, FY2025 forecasts for the Media & EC and Financial segments will be combined as two segments until the listing completes.
Further progress on Japanese homegrown LLMs, accelerating next-generation social infrastructure efforts
Miyakawa provided an update on SoftBank’s next-generation social infrastructure initiatives, first highlighting that SoftBank completed the purchase of land and buildings at the Sharp Sakai Plant, and that the site will be a key facility for ‘AI agents.’
Noting progress on the development of of Japanese language homegrown large language models (LLMs), Miyakawa revealed that “Sarashina mini,” an LLM with 70 billion parameters, will be the first to be commercially available, with a target release date of summer to fall 2025 following an in-house trial.
Turning his attention to AI data centers, Miyakawa noted that with the focus of AI shifting to inference, it will be increasingly necessary to maximize GPU performance and process larger volumes of data. To address the challenge of securing high-performance memory that can transfer large volumes of data to GPUs, Miyakawa said SoftBank will work with partner companies to make samples for core components over the next two years. “We will give details on partner companies and technologies at a later date,” he added.
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More info |
Presentation material (PDF: 18.4MB/71 pages) Supplementary materials: Overview of SoftBank (PDF: 1.69MB/22 pages) |
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(Posted on May 8, 2025)
by SoftBank News Editors
