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British microchip designing giant Arm has announced it has filed paperwork to sell its shares in the US.
The Cambridge-based company, which designs chips for devices from smartphones to game consoles, plans to list on New York’s Nasdaq in September.
Arm did not reveal the number of shares for sale or the price, but its proposed initial public offering (IPO) could be the biggest listing this year.
In March, in a blow to the UK, the firm opted against listing shares in London.
On Monday, Arm announced that it had now publicly filed a registration statement relating to a proposed IPO. It said the number of shares to be offered and the price range for them were yet to be determined.
But the company is reportedly looking for a valuation of between $60bn (£47bn) to $70bn.
Arm was bought in 2016 by Japanese conglomerate Softbank in a deal worth £23.4bn. Prior to the takeover, it was listed in both London and New York for 18 years.
Its chip design instructions and technologies are used by manufacturers like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and technology giants Apple and Samsung to make their own chips.
Listing a firm on a stock exchange takes it from being a private firm to a public company, with investors able to buy and sell shares of a company’s stock on specific exchanges.
Reports previously suggested the firm had sought to raise between $8bn and $10bn through the listing on the technology-heavy Nasdaq platform. Other major technology companies including Google, Apple and Facebook trade on the Nasdaq. 2px presentational grey line
What is an IPO?
Private companies, as a way of raising cash, can start a process to list on a stock exchange.
In an IPO companies offer shares to investors before listing.
The price of the shares is typically set by investment banks hired by the company to run the process.
But once the shares start to be publicly traded, prices are set by supply and demand. The value of the shares, multiplied by how many there are, gives the market value of the company. 2px presentational grey line
Arm was founded in 1990 and has been referred to as the “crown jewel” of the UK’s technology sector.
Reports in January said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had restarted talks with Arm’s owner about listing on the London Stock Exchange.
But the firm said it did not plan to pursue a UK listing, saying the US was “the best path forward”.
The decision raised concerns that the UK market was not doing enough to attract tech company stock offerings, with US exchanges seen to offer higher profiles and valuations.
But Arm’s chief executive Rene Haas has said the company will keep its material intellectual property, headquarters and operations in the UK.
The latest filing shows further intent that Softbank is pushing ahead with the multi-billion dollar sale despite difficult conditions in the global financial markets.
The number of stock market listings has fallen sharply since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Shares in major technology companies have also fallen in the wake of the Covid pandemic.
After an acute shortage of semiconductors during the pandemic, the chip-making industry has faced reduced demand.
Arm’s sales declined to $2.68bn in the year ended 31 March, hurt by a slump in global smartphone shipments. Sales for the three months to 30 June fell 2.5% to $675m.
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Lol. ARM is a sinking ship because of RISC V. Calling it UK is quite disingenuous. It is owned by Softbank in Japan with major stakeholders in China. The only benefit to arm is with proprietary nonsense.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36822806
https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-agrees-to-buy-arm-holdings-for-more-than-32-billion-1468808434
RISC-V will supercede it. ARM became quite a nasty company in its later years.
Oh well, good riddance.
I just want a chip manufacturer that isn’t gonna bug my home! Hopefully someone comes along, takes the RISC-V specs, and makes a truly open-source chip!
I haven’t been following this lately and thought every cell phone mounts some form of chip designed by ARM.
When I read about the announcement I even started wondering if it would be sound to buy some shares (a tiny quantity, I’m no gambler)
Several people say it’s a sinking ship and so now I’m thinking I’d better be careful with this idea.
Why is it sinking? Could I ask you guys to sum it up or give me a flavor of why that is?
Edit: fixed grammar
There are 2 sides to the discussion of arm imo. On the arm side you have the pros of :
- big companies still using their design licenses, for example mobile phones
- with apple making their own soc based on arm, we could see the general computing landscape move away from x86 based computing ( including x64 ) and into arm
- the single board computing world ( think raspberry pi, quartz64,… ) has moved onto arm with the popularity of the raspberry pi
- low power usage
- some data centers ( like aliexpress’ ) have moved towards arm cpus
On the RISC V side the pros are :
- low power usage
- arm as a company has become a bit toxic. I know somebody that worked for arm and left because of the office environment
- despite people shouting “RISC is the future” since the early 90’s, there have been development on the platform recently, mainly a few development boards and single board computers being made and released that are RISC V based and are at decent price.
This is just my knowledge of the discussion, and its a very high level one imo. Feel free to reply and educate me on the subject, specially the RISC V side
ARM is also expanding hugely into the autonomous vehicle space, given the amount of computing required in cars is increasing and low power is very desirable.
RISC-V is an interesting experiment into what an open source ISA looks like, and it is getting funding and interest, but I’d say we’re at least 5-10 years from RISC-V meaningfully competing with ARM’s market share, which it massively dominates currently. It just isn’t a coherent product yet.
RISC V is the first open source Instruction Set Architecture. Everything needed to fab the chip is open source. It is like how Linux dominates the world in enterprise software, RISC V is doing that for chip fabs. ARM is a closed ISA. Making the chips requires paying a royalty to ARM for each chip made. It is a scheme to extract money through manipulation not true competitive innovation or value.
This is like any other market, as soon as an equivalent open source alternative exists, the incumbent extortionist’s days are numbered. Its only customer base is from convenience or ignorance.
Not the first though, is it? There was the amazing OpenSPARC Project that released the hardware description files and full microarchitecture documentation and many more useful things for the UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 under the free/libre and open-source GNU General Public License v2. These processors from what then was Sun Microsystems are pretty much as free as it can ever get, and the main reason why I love that company (sadly, not in its current form as just another brand of Oracle)
Yeah, it’s technically complicated. The “5” in RISC V kinda denotes the history involved in this (IIRC). I’ve seen a bunch of stuff on this, but it has been awhile and my attempt to focus may misconstrue the blur in my mind. So don’t take this as gospel. The previous attempts at a completely open ISA were failures in that they weren’t compatible with the foundry toolchains or peripheral business licenses and tech. They tried to do too much or force change tenured elements that have no open source replacement. RISC V was the first to be practical and garner support from industry and academia. There was a major hurtle that it had to overcome early on. As soon as this happened, the sale of ARM was announced shortly thereafter. I forget the details. It was in a conference talk on YT IIRC. I just recall thinking, that the timing of the sale of ARM spoke volumes about what RISC V is in the grand scheme of things. In 10 years time, I think everything will be RISC V. It will dominate in every sector from small microcontrollers all the way to the largest data centers and everything in between. It will be the final blow to x86, ARM, and anyone that fails to migrate quickly. This is Linux for hardware and fixes a lot of problems that are unaddressed with this proprietary crap designed in closed rooms by a few hundred people. No company or group is smarter than the whole world with unrestricted access.
Maybe I’m missing something, but why don’t they start RISC-V development too?
It’s clear that their completely locked ARM processors will not succeed forever. But the processors and silicon IP they would design for RV would still be theirs and they could licence this to other manufacturers. Also providing good services and customizability is worth a lot.
ARM don’t sell chips. They sell licenses to build chips using their tech. They don’t own any prefab stuff and haven’t got the kit to make their own CPUs beyond the odd prototype.
The part of this poat that I found most interesting was the 2px presentational grey line.
I guess this is their final move of desperation. It will help inflate value for a while at least which will buy Samsung and Apple a bit of time. I still think they might be too late to the plate though. We’ll see
Are they really desperate?
They are still the leader with a big margin if I’m not mistaken.
Yeah I don’t know if you have been following what’s going on with ARM but they have been liquidating like crazy for the past year or more. With everyone investing and developing for Risc-v, including one of the largest ARM CPU manufacturers Qualcomm. That leaves Samsung and Apple in the lurch as they are both ARM dependent and were late to joining Risc-V. Just last week they both pushed $40m into ARM to keep it’s value up.
I wasn’t aware of that, good to know.
Does it really matter for Apple if Arm folds? They will just continue do their own thing, since they control the hardware and software stack. Like what they did with PowerVR they just copied the designs into their own GPUs design. I bet that is going to happen with the Arm designs. They will just turn it into Apple RISC Machines.
Does it really matter for Apple if Arm folds?
Yes. They’ve gone all in on ARM. Having to scramble to do a complex migration from ARM would not only be embarrassing for Apple, but majorly fragmenting for their userbase as well. Architecture moves take time and planning to do right, both of which would get compromised if ARM folded
The one thing Apple has always been really good at is picking dying architecture for their hardware. If Apple uses it, the hardware is practically doomed. (6502/68k/power PC/ARM)
It means a great deal for their market value and hardware reputation. With Risc-V having so many benefits over ARM, especially when looking at core footprint, licensing costs, capable efficiencies, more capable instructions (Risc-V can do division) and manufacturers having so much more flexibility in design and manufacturing the market stands to pass them by rather quickly. Apple doesn’t own ARM, they only license it, even if they did own ARM they would still not benefit much because there is a huge amount of reverse work to be done to get it to stay competitive 5-10 years down the line. This is already something Apple is aware of which is why they have already started investing into Risc
I assume shifting their hardware manufacturing to a new spec might be costly, plus they might have some long term licensing agreement that has locked them into proprietary ARM for years. Either way, it’d be best for Apple if competitors hardware/software continued to be aligned as closely as possible with their own.
Note: I know dick about fuck when it comes to the computer hardware industry.
So much for ‘friend-shoring’, but there’s not much left on this sceptred isle anyway.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Cambridge-based company, which designs chips for devices from smartphones to game consoles, plans to list on New York’s Nasdaq in September.
Arm did not reveal the number of shares for sale or the price, but its proposed initial public offering (IPO) could be the biggest listing this year.
Reports in January said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had restarted talks with Arm’s owner about listing on the London Stock Exchange.
But Arm’s chief executive Rene Haas has said the company will keep its material intellectual property, headquarters and operations in the UK.
The latest filing shows further intent that Softbank is pushing ahead with the multi-billion dollar sale despite difficult conditions in the global financial markets.
Arm’s sales declined to $2.68bn in the year ended 31 March, hurt by a slump in global smartphone shipments.
The original article contains 552 words, the summary contains 135 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
