Apple, Samsung, and Intel to Invest in Arm IPO | Hacker News Reader

Apple, Samsung, and Intel to Invest in Arm IPO

theregister.com

35 pointsbeardyw6 comments

Are they all investing just to prevent one of the other big players to get an upper hand in Arm or what is the play here?

ARM was launched from the origins of Acorn in November 1990 as a joint venture between Apple, Acorn, and VLSI Technology.

So Apple is the right type of investor here. Things have vastly changed since back then of course and Samsung (with their exynos line) is a major ARM customer as well. I expect Qualcomm and Nvidia to be major investors too.

intel doesn't know what it's doing. (see strongARM)

Intel’s foundry side struck a deal with ARM recently. So they are involved with them.

What a surprising RISC-V investment strategy! I mean, I can see a business case for Apple doing this, but Sammy and Intel?

Maybe they will keep buying up all the non-Chinese FAB capacity indefinitely and rely on import restrictions to keep the CCP-malware infected processors at bay.

Why would they go public at this time? It seems like companies do this because they need a big infusion of cash. I’m curious as to what would be going on in the company to warrant this.

My understanding is that it is ARM's parent company Softbank that stands to benefit rather than ARM looking to reinvest the money to fuel growth.

ARM would benefit only slightly, as its employees have RSUs that the company said it would honor in the event that no sale of ARM occurs.

Softbank on the other hand has 10's of billions of losses since 2017 from its vision fund and may be looking to rebalance its books. I can see why ARM would be a good asset to sell from Softbank's perspective. ARM is unlikely to see explosive growth in a new segment, and the market as a whole, and the tech sector in particular has fairly 'healthy' PE ratios[1]. This means that Softbank could realize more cash from a sale now than a hypothetical future time when there is more pessimism in the market.

[1]P/E ratio is the ratio between the price of a stock and its earnings. Some notable outliers are Nvidia @ 232 & AMD @ 483 compared to Intel @ 15.36 or Texas Instruments @ 20.01; PE is higher for companies that are expected to grow and lower for companies that are mature or declining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com