It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth "<i>$87bn</i>". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market players. "Not a very British way of doing business" is A Direct Quote from ARM. ( Edit: Because of perceptual licensing agreement, for those unaware of how ARM business model works )<p>It didn't make sense how ARM was worth $22bn in 2016 on LSE, that has a PE100+ when I cant see how it could double its Net profit in the next 10 years, with a <i>saner</i> valuation of P/E 50. It make even less sense to me when Softbank bought it for $32bn. Didn't make any sense when Nvidia want it for $38.5bn, and later at $50bn+.<p>Now we are back to square one, how many investors, in the open market are willing to buy ARM's stock at a valuation of, let say the same $32bn as Softbank initially paid? Roughly P/E 100, assuming they managed to grow ARM business from 2018 at ~$220M operating income to $300M in 2021. I much rather bet on Intel if I had the money.<p>And of course many on HN will think ARM is worthless because the future is going to be the Riscy Silver Bullet.<p>Disclosures: I do not currently hold any stocks or Mutual Funds, Indexes and other financial instrument.
Soooo back on the LSE or?<p>It was such a hot stock in 2014-15. Softbank kinda bought it at the peak. Still, Apple has proven ARM on the desktop is phenomenal, and Ampere has done the same in the datacenter. Both have swiftly made compiler support accelerate dramatically. I would love for my next desktop to be arm-based, and it would be great if it didn’t NEED to be a mac. Broad adoption of ARM would be a huge win for sustainability. I’m bullish on their business, even if their business model isn’t vertically scalable.<p>I think that RISC V also has a bright future, but its still a bit far out before its a viable competitor. Still there have been some things that look really promising such as what is coming out of SiFive:<p><a href="https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-raises-risc-v-performance-bar-with-new-best-in-class" rel="nofollow">https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-raises-risc-v-performanc...</a><p>And Intel just announced a $1B fund for companies building on their Open Foundry RISC-V alliance. <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-1b-fund-risc-v" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-1b-fund-risc-v</a><p>Big things are happening for small instruction sets… watch this space.
Good. Never a good outcome for the industry for Arm to be owned by Nvidia - and regulators have learned by now that undertakings in these circumstances have little value.<p>Sorry for Simon Segars who must have had a tough job essentially implementing Son's ideas. And those ideas seem to have been pretty poor - Arm China debacle, focus on IoT and selling to Nvidia have all clearly harmed Arm's prospects.<p>It's clear by now that selling CPUs is a mature market but that Arm has room to grow and there is still lots of money to be made in hardware if you innovate - eg in accelerated computing. It's also true both that Arm's model works and that it has more competition than ever from RISC-V.<p>A lot still to play for in my view and I think that the IPO price will reflect that.
Hopefully it will end back on the LSE, there was much lamenting here in the UK when SoftBank acquired them. They are one of the UKs biggest tech success, one of our few “unicorns”. For them to be be back on the LSE it would be a good signal of strength in UK tech.<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some lobbying going on behind the scenes from the UK government to try and ensure it happens. Some strategic tax brakes or regional investment.<p>With the governments (somewhat controversial) investment in OneWeb last year they have shown they have a uk tech strategy. Although I think that was Dominic Cummings doing and he’s well out of the picture.
I think it's interesting how selling Arm to Nvidia or going IPO are _wildly_ different and I think SoftBank doesn't mind what happens to the company as long as they get their return. I mean, at the end of the day financiers will finance but if you're Arm employee this must be a pretty wild ride.
If SoftBank want to maximize their return then they'd probably do best to list ARM in the US. There's no way they'd get the crazy valuations you seen on NASDAQ on the LSE. It's why so many UK tech companies IPO in New York. They don't seem to get particularly excited about tech in London.
My memory might fail me, but I think the compiler wizards were building all the core FB stuff on aarch64 back in like 2014-2015 or something.<p>Someone saw further down the road than I did.
This is hilarious. It shows why buyouts are so broken and hurt shareholders over time. ARMH was public. It got bought out then tried to get sold out and is now back to where it started at a lower share price and capitalization.
This sounds super dumb - but given their acquisition was blocked, would Nvidia be stopped from simply buying the majority of shares at IPO?<p>To be clear I'm not suggesting this will happen or not, I'm just curious if it would be allowed?
>ARM to IPO<p>I'll be looking to pick up some shares as a long-term investment. I think ARM is one of the best things to happen to computing, and anything that threatens the x86 monoculture/hegemony is a good thing in my view.
Why will ARM succeed where MIPS faded into obscurity? (Well, relative obscurity. I see they are still used in media devices and cheap routers.)<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_Technologies" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_Technologies</a>
It's not clear to me, and I'm sure folks here would know. It seems possible that the ARM IPO could end up raising quite a bit less than the Nvidia deal. Couldn't Nvidia buy a majority of ARM shares on the open market, at a discount, with no regulatory oversight?
> before March 2023.<p>Why does it take so long? I would be pretty surprised if they aren't already operating with audited GAAP financials, etc etc. Or is the extended date a hedge against market conditions, to avoid having to announce a delay.