SoftBank Group has officially sold off its shares in NVIDIA. As per our earlier report, the Japanese banking group had begun selling off its stake in the Santa Clara-based company over a duration of nine months that concluded during December last year.
The sale of its shares in NVIDIA netted SoftBank a total of US$3.3 billion (~RM13.44 billion), which is more or less the amount that was forecast by industrial analysts. On a side note, SoftBank also made an US$2.3 billion (~RM9.37 billion) in returns when it sold its share in Flipkart. Bringing the bank’s total cumulative return to US$5.6 billion (~RM22.8 billion).
SoftBank’s decision to sell off its shares in NVIDIA first came to light when the latter’s share value took a plunge and losing 48.8% of its value. Dropping down to between US$140 (~RM570) and US$150 (~RM610) per share. Prior to the release of its GeForce RTX 2060, NVIDIA had hoped that the sale of its new GeForce RTX graphics cards would’ve narrowed the gap. Unfortunately, the expensive retail price of its cards has made it difficult for gamers to switch over to its next-generation graphics cards.
Many observers contribute the decline to NVIDIA’s failure to see the decline in the cryptocurrency mining craze, where the value of a Bitcoin now sits between RM13000 and RM14000. It overestimated the demand for miner-based GPUs, and was left with an excess of GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card. However, NVIDIA has said that that stock is more or less cleared out.
(Source: ZDNet)
