“ARM has been the proudest achievement in my life and so it’s a very sad day for me personally and for technology in Britain”, said ARM founder Hermann Hauser in an interview with ITV. Cambridge-based ARM employs a little more than 4,000 people worldwide.
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Son said he has been thinking of acquiring ARM for the past 10 years.
SoftBank also had debts in excess of $100 million (£76 million) at the end of March and it’ll have to borrow more cash in order to close the ARM deal, according to Bloomberg. This phenomenon – the “internet of things” – is exploding, and ARM is at the forefront of it.
ARM’s chip designs power more than 95 percent of smartphones on the market, including high-end handsets from vendors such as Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Samsung.
Meanwhile, Son was also having discussions with the U.K.’s new Prime Minister, Theresa May, to assure the government that its headquarters and management team will remain in Cambridge.
Chief Technology Officer Mike Muller, one of the dozen founders of the company, said ARM valued technical brilliance above all. This adds to the company’s already massive debt, which has soared since it acquired US telecom company Sprint in 2013. SoftBank said its board approved the deal, but ARM shareholders and the English courts still need to approve it. ARM has recommended the deal be approved by its shareholders.
“The Board of ARM is reassured that ARM will remain a very significant United Kingdom business and will continue to play a key role in the development of new technology”.
“We have long admired ARM as a world renowned and highly respected technology company that is by some distance the market-leader in its field”, SoftBank chairman and chief executive Masayoshi Son said of the deal valuing the British group at about $32 billion or 29 billion euros.
Mrs May’s comments come just a week after she pledged to devise a “proper industrial strategy” to defend United Kingdom companies from being snapped up by foreign businesses, including firms in the UK’s pharmaceutical sector.
Its brilliance was to realise that if chips were about to come with everything, you didn’t have to make them – designing them was the key.
I tend to agree with that stance given both the healthy premium at which SoftBank is making the acquisition, as well as its pledge to significantly invest in ARM’s business while keeping its structure and strategies intact.
Then Autonomy was swallowed up by HP in an ill-fated deal, past year the chipmaker Qualcomm bought CSR, and now the biggest and best, ARM, is about to have a Japanese owner.
ARM traces its history back to the mid-1980s, when a group of software engineers made a decision to design their own microprocessor for the Acorn BBC Micro, a device that introduced a generation of British school children to computing.
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The Japanese firm bought France’s Aldebaran robotics business and has gone on to give it a global profile.
