SoftBank Announces FYE 2006 Results

Softbank Corp. announced their FYE 2006 results yesterday indicating that the parent companies fourth-quarter operating profit more than doubled YoY after buying Vodafone mobile-phone unit last spring. The entire presentation video is available in English Here. The 1.66 trillion yen acquisition made Softbank the second-fastest growing company in sales terms on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average for the fiscal first half ended Sept. 30. Operating profit rose to 73.8 billion yen ($615 million) in the three months ended March 31 from 34.4 billion yen in Q4 2005, while sales more than doubled to 721.9 billion yen from 298.4 billion yen, according to Bloomberg.

Softbank’s operating profit was 271.07 billion yen ($2.26 billion) in the year ended March 31, up from 62.3 billion yen a year earlier according to Reuters. Full-year operating profit at the mobile-phone business doubled to 155.7 billion yen from 76.3 billion yen. Softbank began including the unit’s results as part of group earnings in May 2006. President Masayoshi Son said the company gained more than 160,000 subscribers in April, adding to its 15.9 million customers as of the end of March. Average revenue per user for data services rose by 50 yen from the third quarter to 1,380 yen in the fourth. Overall user revenue declined to 5,210 yen from 5,560 yen in the third quarter.

Softbank is also Japan’s second largest ADSL provider, after NTT, and is the parent company of Yahoo Japan. Softbank shares have lost 8 percent over the last three months, while DoCoMo gained 8.9 percent and KDDI jumped 13 percent in the same period. Shares in Softbank closed down 1.1 percent at 2,700 yen before the company announced its earnings.