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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

The thing I don't get about these acquisitions is, if ARM was this awesome design shop owning essentially all mobile chipsets and then some, why did they need the money? Were they going broke?

If so, then it seems like the right thing to do would be to nationalize. If not, was it just a leadership decision for purposes of expanding the company?

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> if ARM was this awesome design shop owning essentially all mobile chipsets and then some, why did they need the money? Were they going broke?

It’s not the company that gets the money - it’s the owners. This transaction is about SoftBank’s balance sheet, not ARMs.

I was thinking more about the original sale. It's looking like it was just the board seeing dollar signs, coupled with a promise of a huge workforce expansion.

[1] https://www.borntoengineer.com/britains-successful-technolog...

Moreover, if the UK had a strategic leverage objection why didn't they register that objection at that original sale to Softbank?

Could it be that geopolitics has changed their position since then?

I'm no politician but that promise to double the local workforce in Cambridge definitely caught my eye as something that would play really well in that arena. Kind of like how the Foxconn plant got built in the United States.

Well, kind of got built. Foxconn got the money (in the form of major tax breaks) sure , but the promises haven't really panned out. Not that this is an atypical story of course.

Credit to Wisconsin for at least pretending to hold them somewhat accountable by cutting off the gravy train.

That’s exactly what it was - an opportunity to cash in. The other side of this coin is when you have supply shortages and/or a stock mkt run as we now have, some companies end up with huge mkt caps and are able to make purchases like this one. There is an argument that says it’s destructive in a bad way (not Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’) because ultimately it reduces competition and innovation.

From what I understand, the company that owns ARM (Softbank) is having financial problems,and is selling one of its successful assets to try and recover.

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