It’s probably the first time that any company but Apple has been linked with ARM. The first substantial rumours came in 2010, when Apple was said to be ready to pay something like $8billion. Of course, nothing came of it.
The rumours swirled again last year during the ‘M&A frenzy’, when ARM and Apple were once again linked.
So what is the motivation behind the deal? ARM’s CEO Simon Segars says it opens a future ‘more exciting that we could achieve on our own’. Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son points to the ‘significant opportunities provided by the IoT’.
One of the criticisms levelled at UK investors is their short term vision – and it may be this acquisition is a case of ‘taking the money’. But there are also questions about the ambition of UK companies. ARM is one of the top 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. As such, it has access to money and you might think that, if there is the ‘exciting future’ of which Segars speaks, ARM would raise the cash needed to get a significant part of it.
And while the IoT may well offer the ‘significant opportunities’ claimed by Son, a lot of ARM’s technology is aimed at other sectors, unless you subscribe to the idea of the IoT being driven entirely by smartphones.
So the question has to be ‘what has Softbank seen that others appear to have missed?’.
