BEIJING, February 9 (TMTPOST) — Venture capital giant SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son said on Wednesday that ARM is very likely to go public on NASDAQ instead of on a local stock market in the UK.
If ARM chooses to go public on a stock market outside of the UK, London Stock Exchange will suffer huge losses.
NVIDIA announced earlier on Tuesday that they have decided to terminate its quest to buy ARM from SoftBank, which is now seeking an initial public offering for ARM by March 2023.
SoftBank is very likely to go public on NASDAQ, Son said, stating that the United States will be ARM’s public listing destination.
Headquartered in the UK, ARM spun off from Acorn Computers in 1990. It is now a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge. Its primary business is in the design of ARM processors (CPUs), although it also designs other chips. ARM’s energy-efficient chip architecture is used on 95% of smartphones across the globe. The company has around 6,000 employees, about 3,000 of which are based in the UK.
ARM was acquired by SoftBank at US$32 billion in 2016. The British government supported the acquisition in 2016, believing that it was a successful deal.
“We are happy to execute our plan B (public listing for ARM),” Son said, commenting on the cancellation of the acquisition process. “It will be a major IPO, one of the biggest IPOs in the semiconductor industry to date.”
The British government naturally wants one of its biggest and best tech companies to go public on a local stock market to boost the economy. However, many companies in the UK had chosen to go public in New York in the past few years as they believed they could get higher valuation on NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange.
The most valuable tech companies trading on NASDAQ include Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, whose valuations have all reached one trillion dollars. In comparison, the most valuable tech company on London Stock Exchange is valued below US$50 billion.
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