SoftBank swings to Q4 profit as comeback gains steam

TOKYO (Reuters) -Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group swung to a quarterly profit on Monday versus the year earlier, reporting a net profit of 328.9 billion yen ($2.11 billion) for the January-March period.

The result mark the second straight quarter of profit for SoftBank, which has been long known for both volatile earnings and outsized bets on technology companies.

In February, Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said the company was on a return to a "growth trajectory".

Still, it wasn't a runaway success. The Vision Fund investment unit booked an investment loss of 57.5 billion yen, after three consecutive quarters of profit.

The net profit at group level compared with a 32 billion yen loss in the same period a year earlier, when capital raised using SoftBank's stake in Alibaba Group cushioned some of the writedowns in the value of Vision Fund private portfolio companies.

($1 = 155.8500 yen)

(Reporting by Anton Bridge; Editing by David Dolan and Christopher Cushing)