The company’s new CEO, Rene Hass, emailed staff to discuss the cuts, shortly after the news that Nvidia’s bid for the company had collapsed and reportedly said that to stay competitive, the company needed to remove any duplication of work; stop work that was no longer critical to the company’s future success; and think about how work was done.
Crucially it called for more discipline about costs and where Arm invested following its decision to spend heavily to build out its operations after being acquired by SoftBank back in 2016.
As part of its acquisition of Arm Softbank gave a number of assurances to the UK government about jobs and it appears that too many of those created were not necessary to the business. With an IPO expected to now go through by March 2023 it will certainly look better if Arm can be seen to be a leaner more focused operation that’s focused on the Metaverse, Internet of Things, the cloud, automotive, and data centres.
In truth, the biggest blow to UK plc is less the loss of those jobs but rather Softbank’s decision to list Arm on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US, rather than here in the UK.
