Arm Files For IPO On Nasdaq

SoftBank's Arm has filed for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker symbol "ARM." The filing comes five months after the U.K.-based chipmaker announced it had filed confidential, preliminary IPO paperwork with U.S. regulators. TechCrunch reports: The outfit didn't provide a projected share price in its F-1 paperwork, but SoftBank recently bought the 24.99% stake in Arm that it didn't own outright from its Vision Fund unit, reportedly at a valuation of more than $64 billion. That's twice the $32 billion SoftBank paid for Arm seven years ago. (The Vision Fund has outside limited partners, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi; SoftBank sold that stake in Arm to the Vision Fund in 2017 for $8 billion.)

Arm has long developed and licensed what it describes as high-performance, low-cost, and energy-efficient central processing unit (CPU) products and related technology, on which many of the world's leading semiconductor companies and OEMs rely to develop their products. Among customers of the roughly 6,000-person company are Apple, Alphabet, Advanced Micro Devices, Qualcomm, and Mercedes-Benz.

Analysts expect Arm's IPO to be the biggest of 2023, though not everyone agrees that the company is worth what SoftBank thinks it is worth. Late last month, Bernstein analysts assessed Arm's fair-market value to be about $40 billion based on its preliminary analysis of the limited financial information that was available at the time. It isn't clear as of this writing whether Bernstein will revise that estimate based on the financial formation provided in Arm's F-1, including reported net income of $524 million on $2.68 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2023, which ended in March, which is almost exactly what it saw in 2022 sales ($2.7 billion).

One ARM to rule them all....

[jonathantn]

and in the data center bind them.

If it required some sort of pitch

[Z80a]

It could be something like "You're using at least 10-20 of our chips, you probably should consider letting us in"

long on RISC-V

[Luke has no name]

Does it make sense over the long term to think arm has any control over the mobile or server market?

Re:

[Narcocide]

I think it's a bit early to say. RISC-V solutions are barely even in production yet, so accurately predicting what the real-world cost and performance limits will be much later on is nearly impossible. Keep in mind we got this wrong for PATA/SATA too. At that level, sometimes advancements in manufacturing and materials technology can change the paradigm unexpectedly.

Re:long on RISC-V

[ChunderDownunder]

If the progress on star64 and visionfive 2 is any guide, I would expect riscv to replace arm in the $100 tablet market in several years with modest but adequate performance once out of order cores with RVV 1.0 optimised runtimes emerge.

Do Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and Mediatek have anything to worry about in the next 5 years? I can't see the performance gap shrinking that rapidly.

The server could be a different story with parallelizable tasks - SiFive already targeting 128 cores.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

I’m with you. Short-to-mid-term (say, less than 5 years) there’s enough momentum to see ARM continue growing at x86’s expense, but RISC-V seems like an unencumbered competitor that has the potential to steamroll everything as its development matures over the next decade (or two), so I’d expect us to hit peak ARM in roughly 10 years. Companies won’t abandon their investments in ARM overnight, especially those (e.g. Apple) with proprietary extensions that provide competitive adva

Why are they going public?

[RogueWarrior65]

Going public usually means either a need to raise capital or an exit strategy for the founders. Does ARM really need money when they already are licensing extensively?

Re:

[Pravetz-82]

My guess is that SoftBank will sell a minority stake in (probably) the only successful investment they've made over the last decade - ARM, to cover some of the losses from their other investments.