SoftBank to choose U.S over London for Arm’s IPO

CNBC reports that British chip designer Arm has favoured New York and has shunned its home market for its coming IPO.

Arm will likely be publicly listed on the tech-focused Nasdaq stock market within the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023, CNBC quotes Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Japan’s SoftBank, which owns Arm.

Arm was spun out of an early computing company called Acorn Computers in 1990.

Arm’s energy-efficient chip architectures are used in roughly 95% of the world’s smartphones and approximately 95% of the chips designed in China.

Arm has around 6,000 staff globally and 3,000 in the U.K.

It was dual-listed in London and New York up until 2016, when SoftBank bought it for $32 billion.

After acquiring Arm, SoftBank tried to sell it to U.S. chip giant Nvidia but the companies announced on Tuesday that the deal collapsed due to “significant regulatory challenges.”

The U.K. wants its biggest and best tech companies to list on home soil so that they can benefit the wider economy and prop up the stock market.

Arm’s IPO would be a blow to London should it pull through.

The most valuable tech companies on the Nasdaq include Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, which all have a market value of over $1 trillion.

Meanwhile, the most valuable tech firms on the London Stock Exchange are all valued at less than $50 billion.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *