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?"

Comments

Re:Result of brexit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arm wins in the mobile space not because of technology but because of business model.

With ARM you can get ready made off the shelf chips or semi-customized chips base off off the shelf models. You can lisence processor blocks from ARM and other 3rd party vendors and have your own custom chip fabricated or you can license the low level tech and make your own entirely from scratch - You can then fabricate it yourself or have one or multiple third parties fabricate it.(Like apple does) - You can get arm chips however you like, for as cheap or as expensive as you like. - Do it yourself or pick from dozens of vendors.

With Intel? Well, Intel makes a crazy powerful chip that sips power.. But you only get the small handful of models Intel makes, and you can only get them from Intel. (And thus you are at Intel's mercy)

Turns out that for the mobile market ARM's business model works better.

Re:Meanwhile in ARM's Cambridge HQ

[Junta]

The sad things is that businesses by and large *hate* any hardware portion of a business. So they're perfectly happy to have a pure IP company that licenses out to companies that in turn are generally *also* fabless. The more they 'saddle' some other sap with the capital intensive business of building and moving real physical goods, the happier they are.