Vision Fund adds managing partners in India, China

They are two of four executives elevated to managing partner, alongside US-based Lydia Jett and Vikas Parekh. Jett, who leads e-commerce coverage and is board member of Korea’s Coupang and India’s Flipkart, is the first woman to hold this title.

Vision Fund had 10 managing partners prior to these promotions, according to its website. Three focus on Asia: Eric Chen, Greg Moon, and Kentaro Matsui.

Juneja joined the firm in 2018 after nearly a decade at Norwest Venture Partners, where he made early and growth-stage investments in the likes of Swiggy, Quikr, and Yes Bank. Before that, he was a founding member of Goldman Sachs’ Asia special situations team in India.

Chang is also an alumnus of Goldman’s Asia special situations business. He was with the group for more than 11 years, latterly as a managing director responsible for leading deals across China and Asia Pacific. Chang, who started in M&A advisory at Goldman, was recruited by Vision Fund in 2019.

SoftBank is currently deploying its second Vision Fund, having provided the entire $40 billion corpus from its own resources after troubles with Vision Fund 1 – which closed at $98.6 billion – stymied efforts to raise third-party capital. Fund I performance later rebounded, and Fund II is being invested aggressively, albeit mostly in smaller, earlier-stage deals than those favored by its predecessor.

At the same time, the geographic balance of the Asia portfolio has changed, with commitments in India and Southeast Asia accelerating as activity in China has been held back by regulatory uncertainty. It was announced in August that the Vision Funds’ exposure to China would fall from one-third to 23%. Fund II already has more invested in Asia ex-China than in China.

SoftBank posted a net income of JPY363.6 billion ($3.2 billion) for the six months ended September 2021, down from JPY1.88 trillion a year earlier. This was driven by losses of JPY879.2 billion in the Vision Fund portfolio as valuations of listed Chinese technology companies plummeted.

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