Masayoshi Son, SoftBank CEO (glen photo/Shutterstock)

Soft­Bank claims $5B stake in Roche amid grand plans to in­vest in biotech — re­ports

Soft­Bank has made a some­what sur­pris­ing choice in its bid to pour bil­lions in­to biotech and health­care.

The Japan­ese be­he­moth has qui­et­ly ac­quired a $5 bil­lion stake in Roche, mak­ing it one of the Swiss phar­ma gi­ant’s largest in­vestors, Bloomberg re­port­ed. The Fi­nan­cial Times lat­er con­firmed the news.

The move marks a sig­nif­i­cant de­par­ture from Soft­Bank’s pre­vi­ous strat­e­gy of chan­nel­ing biotech in­vest­ments through its Vi­sion Fund in­to ear­ly-stage star­tups such as Vir, Sana, XtalPi, Umo­ja and Ex­sci­en­tia. It al­so placed a siz­able bet on Roivant back in 2017, lead­ing a $1.1 bil­lion round, long be­fore Vivek Ra­maswamy and his suc­ces­sor, Matt Gline, land­ed a SPAC merg­er at a val­u­a­tion of $7 bil­lion.

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