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SoftBank To Buy British Chip Designer ARM For $32 Billion (cnet.com)
SoftBank has agreed to acquire British chip designer ARM Holdings for $32 billion in cash. The purchase will give Japan's multinational telecommunications and Internet corporation a slice of virtually every mobile computing gadget on the planet and future connected devices in the home. ARM, unlike Intel, doesn't manufacture chips, but licenses the design for it. ARM customers shipped roughly 15 billion products with ARM chips inside in 2015. This also marks the first large-scale, cross-border transaction in Britain since it voted to exit the European Union last month. "I have admired this company for over ten years," SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son told reporters at a press conference in London on Monday. "This is an endorsement into the view of the future of the U.K."
ARM assumes the tentpole position in chips for mobile devices. It was one of the first companies to aggressively focus on mobile devices while other semiconductor companies were ramping up their efforts on desktops. SoftBank, which is based in Tokyo has become one of the most acquisitive companies in the recent years. It heavily invests in technology, media, and telecommunications companies. ARM could provide an additional boost to SoftBank's mobile strategy. SoftBank, for instance, also owns about 83 percent of the American wireless operator Sprint.
Hermann Hauser, one of ARM's founders, said, "ARM is the proudest achievement of my life. The proposed sale to SoftBank is a sad day for me and for technology in Britain." BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones asked, "Question -- if ARM goes, what's left as a worldbeating UK-owned tech player?"
ARM assumes the tentpole position in chips for mobile devices. It was one of the first companies to aggressively focus on mobile devices while other semiconductor companies were ramping up their efforts on desktops. SoftBank, which is based in Tokyo has become one of the most acquisitive companies in the recent years. It heavily invests in technology, media, and telecommunications companies. ARM could provide an additional boost to SoftBank's mobile strategy. SoftBank, for instance, also owns about 83 percent of the American wireless operator Sprint.
Hermann Hauser, one of ARM's founders, said, "ARM is the proudest achievement of my life. The proposed sale to SoftBank is a sad day for me and for technology in Britain." BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones asked, "Question -- if ARM goes, what's left as a worldbeating UK-owned tech player?"
Company I've never heard of buys most important processor company in the world. Wow.
First, btw.
Did they use the cheap pound to shop a british company?
Japanese are buying the world. Welcome our new overlords
any chance of $100 CPU's and 20GB OS images making it in the IoT world?
This is a purchase!
And it means the United Kingdom has lost another piece!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
What major companies are left in the UK?
It's a little bit RISCy...
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Has everyone at Slashdot forgotten those dark days in the late 90s when the only way Apple stayed afloat was by selling their shares of ARM? They were one of the founding investors along with Acorn and VLSI. What would their stake be worth today had they not had to liquidate so much of it just to remain solvent?
intel runs from the market..
arm gets acquired...
when's the first mainstream MIPS device coming out? owait, they got bought out, too.
oh, well. back to my flip phone.
Who owned ARM before?
As I type, the new British Prime Minister has applauded the deal of ARM being bought by foreigners. She doesn't have a maths degree, so it must be really difficult for her to understand all profits now will no longer boost UK GDP, but instead boost Japan's GDP. In UK, the man who setup ARM, some of the press / political commentators and economists attacking the deal, but the politicians know best. At least the bosses of ARM get very rich from the deal.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
This makes no sense for SoftBank.
They are paying a lot of money ($32 billion) for gross income of around $1.2billion, and profits of about 1/2 of that. Based on that, it will take 30-40 years for the investment to pay SoftBank off, based on ARMs revenue alone.
Something doesn't add up. On one hand, they're saying that they don't plan to change their business model, or even how their R&D is done in the next years, but on the other hand - they will need to come up with something really amazing if they want to recover this investment.
You can buy a lot of other things for $32 billion that would be a far safer bet.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
Company I've never heard of buys most important processor company in the world. Wow.
Softbank is one of the 100 largest companies in the world. You not knowing them speaks more to your ignorance of Japan than anything else. They've been a big player in the tech world for decades.
And Intel might disagree about who is the most important processor company in the world though ARM certainly has an argument for the title. ARM is king of the hill in mobile devices but changes are you typed your posting on a device with an Intel microprocessor. Which is more important? Guess that depends on your point of view.
The Softbank CEO walk in and asks "So where are your factories?"
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's funny. Apple had a hand in ARM's founding. They were collaborating on RISC chips with Acorn, and that was spun-off into ARM. Apple owned a decent chunk of it for a while, but I don't know when they sold that share off.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
At least you've got TopGear.
Um, nevermind.
ARM holdings had to tread a very delicate line between generating enough revenue and customers going elsewhere.
I seriously doubt that the new owners will manage the same trick, they'll try to drive more profit out of the business and the customers will just slip away..
Bye ARM, it was nice to know you.
The UK is still in the EU and will be for quite a while as negotiations for the exit transpire. (i.e. this happend within the EU structures and with EU rules still governing)
As others point out, deals like this take a while AND the market fluctuations in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote actually drove the price up for the Japanese buyers.
It's hard to fairly tie this to Brexit either for good or for ill. Nobody knows the details of the Brexit arrangements yet, so anybody predicting whether the post-Brexit environment would be good or bad for deals like this is smoking something (and that includes the sellers and the buyers). This deal is going through because both the buyers and the sellers are gambling that it's a good deal for their own interests and reasons no matter how the Brexit arrangements work out. Neither party to this deal is able to even safely assume Brexit will happen; they have to assume it's possible that all the Remainers will be able to stall the Brexit into not happening, or that a new wave of Turkish/Syrian refugees will wash over Europe and hasten Brexit and possibly even Frexit.
What truly enables all this is the degree of ecenomic globalism that the multi- and trans-national corporations and bankers have managed to put in place to enable them to easily move money, physical assets, labor, and IP all around the globe on a whim, for nearly any reason like dodging taxes or harvesting tax credits or evading labor or environmental rules. All this globalism went on steroids in the 1990s. Things like Brexit and Frexit that reign-in the big dreams of the multinationals are about the only way to limit stuff like this.