SBI’s Crypto-Focused Venture Capital Arm Sees Major Turnaround On Year

SBI Securities’ trading revenue surged 19.2% in 2019, largely due to the inclusion of the company’s crypto investment wing, which turned a $7.1 million loss into a $30 million profit over the year.

Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings released its new financial report on Oct. 30. The report analyzed results for the six-month period ended Sept. 30, 2019 and witnessed major growth of SBI’s crypto-heavy venture capital arm in 2019 amid a general decline in SBI’s revenue.

SBI VC Trade profits grow over $30 million over a year

According to the report, SBI VC Trade’s profit before income tax expense has seen a considerable increase in the first half of the fiscal year (FY) 2019. The number has surged from 765 million Japanese yen ($7.1 million) in losses in H1 FY2018 to as high as 3.2 billion yen ($30 million) in profits in H1 FY2019, the firm said.

SBI Holdings noted that SBI VC Trade, an SBI affiliate that operates a crypto asset exchange, became a subsidiary of SBI Securities in July 2019. 

SBI’s crypto mining business SBI Crypto surges $10 million

Alongside notable growth of crypto exchange-driven profits, SBI has also recorded a significant increase in profits from its cryptocurrency mining business SBI Crypto, according to the report. As such, the business’ profit before income tax expense added almost $10 million from 783 million yen ($7.2 million) in losses in H1 FY2018 to 293 million yen ($2.7 million) in H1 FY2019.

SBI added that it also expects a further increase in the scale of crypto asset mining due to new miner operations within the year as well as in-house miner operations in 2020.

Earlier this year, SBI established a dedicated division for manufacturing crypto mining chips.

Further advances with Ripple

Similarly to previous financial reports, SBI has again outlined the growing importance of Ripple’s technology in its remittance division, SBI Remit as well as the development of Ripple’s xCurrent-based remittances. SBI noted that its Ripple-connected subsidiary SBI Ripple Asia is expected to cover nearly 50% of the overall Ripple network once the connection is activated.

On Oct. 1, Cointelegraph reported on SBI Securities and five other Japanese brokerage firms including Rakuten Securities setting up Japan Security Token Offering Association.