SoftBank Group heads into its June 24 earnings with a recovery story that short sellers are notably unwilling to challenge — a posture worth examining given what the last two prints delivered.
The price recovery is the opening fact. After last week's note documented an 18.4% collapse to ¥7,048, the stock has clawed back 0.8% over the past five days to ¥7,102. The one-month gain now sits at 23.6%, making this a stock that has bounced hard off whatever drove the sharp sell-off, and currently trades fractionally above the analyst consensus target of ¥7,163 — a near-perfect convergence of price and Street fair value that is itself an interesting setup ahead of results.
The lending market remains almost entirely uninterested in the bear case. Availability is running at roughly 6,297% of short interest — meaning there are more than sixty shares available to borrow for every one currently shorted. That figure is actually looser than the 5,961% recorded in the previous note, reversing a brief tightening trend and sitting far above the 52-week floor of 1,100%. Borrowing costs are similarly unmoved, holding at 0.84% annualised and effectively unchanged over both the week and the month. That is about as cheap and available as borrow gets. Short sellers are not building positions into this earnings release.
The ORTEX short score tells the same story from the other direction. It has drifted gently higher to 26.4 from 25.9 ten days ago, but that is a low absolute level — placing SoftBank in the 88th percentile of the short-score factor rank, meaning the stock ranks well on the spectrum of "not heavily shorted." Day-to-count at the 76th percentile reinforces that. Whatever pressure drove the 18% drop last week, it came from sellers rather than shorts adding conviction.
The earnings history is where the note turns more charged. The two most recent prints produced ugly reactions. May's result triggered a 3.6% one-day fall, which extended to a 15.8% five-day loss — the kind of delayed deterioration that suggests bad news took time to fully reprice. The November quarter before that saw a 10.6% fall on the day, moderating to a 10.6% five-day move. That is a consistent pattern of post-earnings weakness, and with the stock now trading essentially at the analyst consensus target, there is limited buffer for disappointment. On the valuation side, the EV/EBITDA multiple has compressed by roughly 4.5 turns over the past 30 days to 32.5x — a meaningful re-rating lower — while the price-to-book has moved in the opposite direction, up 0.45 over the same period to 2.1x. The two moves reflect a portfolio whose book value is being marked up even as earnings-based multiples contract, a tension consistent with SoftBank's AI-era positioning debate.
Ownership structure adds one further layer of context. Masayoshi Son holds 34% of the company — a concentration that creates natural price insensitivity on the largest block. BlackRock and Nomura Asset Management each hold around 6.3%, both with modest recent additions. Capital Research added nearly 6.4 million shares through April. None of these moves are large enough to shift the picture, but the direction of Western institutional flows is mildly constructive.
What to watch heading into June 24 is whether the earnings release shifts the positioning calculus: the borrow market is loose enough that any negative surprise could prompt rapid short-building without a squeeze backdrop, while a positive print would arrive against a stock already trading at consensus with a multiple that has been compressing on earnings-based metrics even as the month-long rally unfolded.
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