(Reuters) – SoftBank Group Corp <9984.T> made significant option purchases in the U.S. stock market in recent weeks as a way of temporarily investing some of its proceeds from asset sales, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.
In August, SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son had announced a new investment management subsidiary that would park excess cash from a massive asset sale program in liquid stocks.
So far, SoftBank has spent roughly $10 billion buying shares. It has also spent more buying derivatives in U.S. stocks, the sources said. The Financial Times first reported on these derivative purchases on Friday.
A SoftBank spokeswoman declined to comment.
SoftBank has already built a stake worth around $1.2 billion in e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O>, according to regulatory filings.
In addition to Amazon, the Japanese tech conglomerate has built stakes in Netflix Inc <NFLX.O>, Tesla Inc <TSLA.O>, Microsoft Corp <MSFT.O> and Alphabet Inc <GOOGL.O>, according to the filings.
In total, SoftBank has injected roughly $4 billion building up these stakes.
(Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York and Anirban Sen in Bengaluru; Editing by Tom Brown)
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