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Arm will be launched in September this year, and Amazon also wants to participate!
According to Reuters, Amazon is contacting Arm, hoping to participate in Arm's first IPO as an anchor investor .
At present, many companies, including Apple, Samsung Electronics, Nvidia, and Intel, plan to invest immediately after Arm's US stock listing.
Those investors, however, won't get any board seats or control, and SoftBank Group will still hold a majority stake, the sources said.
Some media have speculated that Amazon's sudden entry this time is partly due to the use of Arm-based chips in the cloud computing business (AWS), and it may also want to buy stocks at a lower price in anticipation of future cooperation.
In this regard, some netizens said:
Amazon's entry may change the rules of the game in the future, so exciting!
In addition, many netizens also dubbed the move of semiconductor manufacturers as "chip monopoly alliance".
There are also some netizens who can't bear it anymore and ask questions online:
When can I buy it?
Largest IPO
According to previous news, Arm plans to list on Nasdaq in the United States in early September this year, with a valuation of approximately US$60 billion , and is now seeking to raise US$8 billion to US$10 billion.
In May of this year, Arm submitted an application for an initial public offering of shares to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It is reported that SoftBank will formally apply for listing on Nasdaq later this month.
Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, Arm is one of the few technology companies in the UK that is a global leader. The UK has also been lobbying for a listing on the London Stock Exchange.
However, earlier this year, Arm rejected the British side and said it would seek a listing on the US stock exchange, but did not rule out the possibility of listing in London.
If the listing goes well, Arm will be the largest IPO in the technology industry since Alibaba in 2014 and Meta in 2012.
At present, 75% of Arm's shares are held by SoftBank Group, and the remaining 25% are held by SoftBank Vision Fund. For this listing, the Vision Fund plans to sell 10%-15% of its shares in the open market.
As we all know, chips are in the upper reaches of all hardware manufacturers, and Arm can be said to be the upper reaches of the upper reaches . The various chip architecture design patents it has mastered seem to form the top three architectures with x86 and RISC-V. Its customers include most semiconductor manufacturers, such as Intel. , AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm etc.
Arm, as one of the most profitable businesses under Softbank, previously released its third fiscal quarter (as of the end of December 2022) showing that its total revenue in the last quarter reached US$746 million, a year-on-year increase of 28%.
But even if it can fight like this, it can't stop the parent company "Softbank" from losing money year after year.
SoftBank's lifeline
In 2016, SoftBank acquired Arm for $31 billion, the largest acquisition of a European technology company that year.
The listing process of Arm can also be described as twists and turns. It was listed on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange in the United States in 1998, but it was delisted after being acquired by SoftBank Group in 2016.
After being acquired, Arm has become one of the few profitable businesses of Softbank, and most of its other businesses have been in a state of continuous losses, especially its "Vision Fund", which specializes in investing in technology companies, is the one that invested in "95% of users are robots " . mechanism.
As of the end of December 2022, SoftBank's net loss in the third fiscal quarter reached US$5.9 billion, of which the Vision Fund alone had a net loss of US$5 billion , the fourth consecutive quarter of loss.
In order to stop losses, Softbank founder Masayoshi Son once planned to sell Arm to Nvidia for US$40 billion, but due to the opposition of the US Federal Trade Commission and the EU antitrust regulators, the acquisition eventually fell through.
Subsequently, the business was weak, and Sun Zhengyi, who was stuck in the quagmire, sold shares to cash out, and seized the time to push Arm to go public as soon as possible in order to reverse the situation.
In fiscal year 2022, SoftBank will cash out US$7.7 billion by selling shares in companies such as Uber, Coupang, SenseTime, Paytm, Guardant, and Shell. In August of this year, it once again "reduced its holdings in Alibaba" to cash out 34 billion U.S. dollars, and the current shareholding ratio has dropped to 14.6%.
Therefore, at the recent Softbank quarterly report meeting, the leader Masayoshi Son announced that the daily management of Softbank will be handed over to several executives of the company, and said:
To slow down investment and adopt a conservative investment strategy, we will temporarily focus on Arm.
In addition to pushing Arm to go public, Softbank has also started to make new moves recently.
Its "Vision Fund" led the US$65 million Series E financing of Tractable, a British insurance technology company. Tractable is a company that uses AI to process insurance claims, and its market value in 2021 has exceeded US$1 billion.
What do you think of this time Amazon and other major manufacturers have entered the game?
参考链接：
[1]https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-talks-become-anchor-investor-arm-ahead-ipo-sources-2023-08-08/
[2]https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Apple-Samsung-to-invest-in-Arm-as-it-eyes-September-IPO/
[3]https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/07/nvidia-calls-off-its-efforts-to-acquire-arm/