Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering
arm.com
arm.com
Trouble is, its success and its sector has given it a profile that attracts attention from the likes of Softbank who have other ideas. A company doesn't need to have a Nvidia like P/E ratio to be successful.
Absolutely true. Sadly nowadays, especially in the US, and especially in tech, unless the company is growing like crazy or massive, it's considered as insignificant and dimissed.
Maybe in Silicon Valley, were decades of totem disdain for anything resembling a business education is starting to take its toll. For anyone with a financial background, slow-growing profitable companies are most American industry. If you want to grow slowly (or barely at all), and want investors who like that, offer a dividend and price at a reasonable P/E.
Predicting the future is hard. Stock prices are based on extrapolated current information and mostly hype.
It begun with the invention of the computer as we know it... - Charles Babbage,"Father of the computer", British - Alan Turing, "Father of modern computer science", British
Then there was Margret Thatcher who decided the internet was a fad and wasn't worth investing in internet infrastructure in the country.
Where did the multi billion (if not trillion by now) industry end up? Silicon Valley and elsewhere....
Bravo UK... Bravo </sarcasm>
The mistake Thatcher made was to open up the telecoms market to competition at a time when the legacy provider (BT) were starting to build a high speed internet highway/backbone. In hindsight, this could indeed be considered an error but looking how BT have fared since, perhaps not?
We're now in the absurd situation where 4 out of 6 power generating companies are foreign owned and the Japanese own our chip manufacturer.
All because of her policies that originally envisioned that the share holding would be by the British public, not foreigners.
And the latest scandal is that our water companies are dumping ridiculous amounts of sewage into our waterways while giving out huge dividends. And there's nothing anyone seems to be able to do about it.
I recall Blair saying he regretted not doing enough about energy security when he was in power, I don't recall him blaming Thatcher?
Brown expands nuclear ambitions (2008): The prime minister said that with oil prices soaring, it was time to be "more ambitious" for nuclear plans... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7424158.stm
There has been a long history of failure, by both sides of the political spectrum.
Blair was the only other recent politician with similar power. He was actually a fan of privatisation and deregulation (and still is, if you read recent interviews).
And recent governments don't even want to fix it, the status quo benefits their rich donors, even if it's massively hurting Britain's long-term prosperity. You've also got a significant section of the Tory party that still believe in the thoroughly discredited neoliberalism Thatcher followed, as seen by Liz Truss' disastrous tenure.
I'm not a Thatcher hater, but there were a lot of negatives as well as positives.
This is the most charitable interpretation of events (no sarcasm intended[1]), and one I would like to believe, but greed is very powerful and leads people to evil, so I can well imagine various lobbying groups would have seen the easy mid-term money to be made from such sales.
[1] "Never attribute to malice that which may be adequately be explained by incompetence."
She decided it was better to open the market to foreign cable TV providers and so barred BT from selling TV access.
Without TV there was no driver for fibre investment.
Where BT would have had a requirement to provide universal access to fibre, as with phone provision, Telewest and NTL just did geograhically limited roll outs of legacy coax and the rest is history.
Also it denies agency to those in power in the decades that followed. I mean did that decision bind the policymakers that followed when it became clear how important the internet really was?
This seems unbelievable now, but the relevant reference is https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
I wonder to what extent the overarching business culture of the UK (which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession) might have anything to do with it.
(...speaking as a former UK eng myself)
Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is British, after all.
Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.
Germany has a far stronger industrial base still, I'd imagine if you want access to the EU you'd base yourself there.
The UK is no longer in the EU. Quite a significant point!
It eventually runs out. The US healthcare system can eventually bankrupt you no matter how careful you are, if your health problems are serious enough.
It eventually runs out. Medical bankruptcy is pretty widespread in the US.
It eventually runs out. Medical bankruptcy is pretty widespread in the US.
Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits, not even those with career-ending disabilities. You’re underestimating the inequality of benefits within the US.
Not a permanent work stoppage example, but here is one relevant anecdote: I have personal knowledge of someone who got severely crippled by a freak accident that would have made most Americans go bankrupt and never be able to work again, including a need for repeated brain surgery. His FAANG employer benefits paid for what he needed, and although he was permanently wheelchair bound, he was eventually even able to return to work part-time (of course not initially) because of how good their benefits are.
That's interesting. What's your data source showing this outcome?
Honestly, even the comp allows building savings so rapidly that it helps a lot even before considering the benefits - and one of the benefits, at least at Google, was by far the best 401(k) plan I’ve ever heard of, including allowing less common options in the law which most plans don’t want the administrative hassle of allowing, and lower expenses than retail investing. So personal wealth (and therefore defense against high medical bills) grows really fast at those companies, and then the benefits most allow the employees not to spend those savings on medical costs.
Dismiss my assertions if you like, since they indeed aren’t statistically proved. But I don’t think there’s likely to exist public statistical data either proving or disproving my claim, so assertions like mine are the best we have. Any private data that might exist with sufficiently tailored scope would be kept within the HR department of Facebook or Google, and I’ve never seen it.
I should also probably clarify that I’m talking about US technical or managerial/executive full-time employees and not, say, someone who works in a warehouse shipping Google Store phone purchases, or employees with a foreign comp and benefits package.
But answering you on the merits: it’s entirely possible, yes.
For example, what if sensible life choices include moving out of state to a place where there is less tech industry? Just changing jobs can interrupt healthcare and cause costs. And the process of switching providers is, in the experience of a friend with a family with complex healthcare needs, sometimes so kafkaesque it might not be worth the risk.
What if sensible life choices involve blowing the whistle or just being critical of the industry? Can you risk it?
What if sensible life choices mean wanting to substitute time so your partner can go back to work? Does their plan match yours for the benefits you’ve both come to rely on?
It’s not unusual at all for people in all sorts of situations and on all sorts of incomes to effectively end up tied to a job by the security of specific features of a workplace health plan.
Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument.
I do wonder if people in the particular FAANG bubbles are just too young and healthy to understand that healthcare plans aren’t just a tradeable, interchangeable perk: once you are really deeply using them, they can get a lot less interchangeable.
I have bought them on healthcare.gov, and I have received them from employer, and it all seems to be interchangeable from my experience over the last 10+ years.
> This comes across as quite rude, TBH.
Sorry if you saw it as rude, but I was politely asking from my perspective. It's normal to ask folks for evidence backing up their claim when you don't find it believable. How could I have asked my question in a more polite way?
> Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument.
I did. And I failed to come up with an explanation based on my decades of work experience. Healthcare has never chained me to a job even when I had health problems. Pretty much every company offers a healthcare plan. The only thing that ever concerned me was becoming unemployed.
The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be.
The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.
And if it isn't NHS vs. "doesn't &everyone* get medical-bankruptcy?" then it'll be about guns, or the death penalty, or overt racism in the south, or corporate america's excesses, or US foreign-policy, and so on. Because those are the things that Channel 4 will report on - but you won't see or read stories that upset anyone's feelings on their place in the world: and it works on everyone: I've already mentioned Guardian-reading types, but also and especially the Brexit-types: who still desperately want to believe the British empire could be brought-back because the Daily Express told them so.
Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor.
Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better).
But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.
And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality of care within a reasonable time. But it's nothing close to how good it used to be so for the serious part of my care I went to the far better hospital in Brazil covered by my employer provided insurance.
I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride.
The US does provide better care right now if you are rich or privileged enough to have a job that is in demand. But a well funded NHS is a far better system if the political will to get back to that exists.
In the US, if possible, carry long term disability insurance to mitigate this risk.
I am not sure that is the case? The country seems to have a weird obsession with the NHS and seems to downplay/overlook its problems. Frankly even before its recent woes, I found it pretty shit compared to socialized healthcare in France.
The current state of the NHS should prompt riots, yet everyone seems complacent in seeing their literal lifeline being destroyed by greedy, incompetent & senile oligarchs.
I guess it looks more grim for the "lower end of the spectrum" in the U.S.
Free at the cost of a significantly larger portion of his salary in tax for his entire life.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
That's accurate. But what surprises me is how much in demand software engineers are globally and how little they get paid in most countries. It doesn't make any sense to me that Dan Abramov could more than triple his salary at Facebook just by being employed by the US branch. The value he provides to the company would in no way change.
Ah! Now I get it. That rhymes with companies like Shell and Unilever leaving the EU in favour of UK after brexit.
(Not that Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam or Paris are known to be heavy investors in tech innovation, btw.)
Now, I know what you're thinking, that that's just because both firms coincidentally signed multi-billion dollar deals coincidentally with Sunak's family business, Infosys, to coincidentally outsource all their IT jobs but I assure you that's a mere coincidence.... probably. :P
All subpar but the marketing and virtue signaling is great. A lot of 'make Canada look good' comes at the expense of Canadians.
There's nothing in the tech space that is worth even looking at twice in this province that isn't headquartered elsewhere. Most larger companies open up here just to tap into the potential talent that don't want to leave their home province and a lot of companies aren't willing to put in the effort of dealing with Quebec being the exception to everything.
If you want to understand Quebec it really boils down to three points:
- Protect French language - Protect culture - Have more children. This achieves 1 & 2 in a cycle.
Things that are going well for the province, cheaper car insurance, cheaper housing, cheaper electricity, and subsidize daycare. Oh! This all ties back into our 3 rules.
All these advantages come at the cost of higher taxes, but that is apart of the strategy. Don't build wealth, but just provide enough for hope, dreams of having a family and rope as many into this to fulfil the 3 points.
And aviation. The Bombardier C-Series is a very advanced plane, and the first modern plane developed outside of Boeing or Airbus (outside of the smaller regional Embraer). Sadly American protectionism was the final nail in the coffin for the programme, but Airbus is comitted to the Mirabel site and assembly line, so Quebec still is one of the top aviation hubs in the world.
Curious to see you prove that beyond an imagined stereotype. It's not as though we are in the first generation of US entrepreneurship and there is not a huge quantity of US inherited wealth in those VC funds. The founders of Intel, Apple, Walmart, Standard Oil etc. have all passed on. And on the other side, it's not like there haven't been a dozen generations since Norman lords chopping up all the land wealth. I think only one British billionaire is an aristo, the rest are business folk.
People underestimate the effect of how wealth attracts wealth in terms of commercial hubs - money chases opportunity and opportunities chase money and they end up in the same place for all sorts of reasons. It's just a system effect rather than a consequence of higher virtues that some love grant themselves.
I think the argument is that there _is_ plenty of money, it's just parked safely and quietly in property rather than investing in production or R&D. And not a "conspiracy" as much as the blank look the property investor class give you when you can't promise risk free leveraged 7% forever.
Why would you want to take funding from someone expecting no stress or hassle?
The important word here is "money". There isn't a surfeit of money available from more suitable investors.
It's obviously not just about 'money'.
- Dyson: actually an innovator! Made many of the same criticisms of the UK lack of tech strategy. Promoted Brexit, which has made the situation worse by erecting barriers to a key UK market.
- Ratcliffe: owns INEOS: oil refineries. Old school engineering? Or just provision of capital?
- Hinduja: purchaser of Ashok Leyland, which became a huge success once unshackled from disastrous management of British Leyland. Counts as "engineering" but not "tech"?
- Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster: classic aristo landlord. Owns large areas of London.
- Platt: hedge funds.
""The reality is that there is no willingness within the Eurozone to share wealth," he said. "In the United States, if California is having a really difficult time, the rest of the United States will send money to California. This is not the case in Europe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Platt_(financier) , perhaps a surprising advocate of redistribution
- Coates: gambling. Counts as "tech startup" (bet365)
- Bamford: heir to JCB, the excavator company. "Engineering". Brexiter, as a result of being sued for antitrust by EU
- Branson: definitely self-made, across a large number of different companies. Space billionaire, closest figure to British Musk.
- Currie: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.
- Reece: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.
- Cadogan, 8th Earl Cadogan: aristo. Dead.
- Lewis: trader. Like Soros, profited from Black Wednesday. Under arrest in Manhattan.
- Reuben: metals. Seem to have made a killing from 90s Russia.
- Graff: diamonds. Looks like classic self-made from nothing story?
- Calder: Jive records.
- Morris: Home Bargains. Wildly successful discount shopkeeper.
(you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth)
I wonder if ARM's success, or rather, popularity and market dominanance, is because they (intentionally or otherwise) devalued themselves enough.
They have collected very little profit from their market-dominating IP.
If they collected much more profit from each device sale then they wouldn't have market-dominating IP. Because they'd have competitors who could undercut them.
As it is, a tiny firm of people make an extremely good living off a margin that nobody in the business can really quibble with, and it has without conflict sustained them to do greater and greater work that has changed the world.
You watch: ARM post-IPO will inevitably have to start squeezing more juice out of the market to give to greedier, more transactional, more activist shareholders, and this will fuck up the balance entirely.
An ARM IPO isn't really going to be good for anyone, I think.
The defining question is if the world is better off by having people play that game or the one where everyone tries to takeover everything all the time.
It's a longer game, so hopefully ARM employees still own some equity.
It is a repeated pattern and people are not stupid. (See also the Sherlock phenomenon with Apple). Valve, for example, have to invest in proton as the ultimate back up plan. For me personally that has proven quite helpful, but your initial business has to be wildly successful for you to be able to play defensive moves like that.
This leads to a situation where mid sized companies are few in number and unstable.
That second part wasn't in the original claim, though. The parent comment is right. Sure, 21st century Microsoft has come for the utilities market, for the Lotus-to-Evernote market, etc., etc., but an entire software industry really did spring up in the eighties through to the early 2000s filling gaps in Microsoft software.
Microsoft absolutely expands into areas it considers strategic profit or capability centers. E.g. office productivity, web browser, database, gaming, etc.
But they, and especially early/smaller Microsoft (90s-00s), left a ton of money on the table for the good of the platform. Because they realized they couldn't do it all and be best-of-everything.
The fact that Microsoft can deploy its level of resources (e.g. crush Lotus) when they decide to doesn't mean that they always decide to.
SQL Server, Dynamics, TrueType/Silverlight, Hyper-V, Microsoft Money, Softimage was owned by MS, Activision are in the process of being bought by MS, Epic and EA both compete with MS.
In the case of the above Microsoft has tried to compete with, kill, or acquire all of them. That's using others to do the hard work of market discovery.
And yet, these companies are all extremely large and healthy.
Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard is a great example, because it speaks to the modern competitive landscape.
Microsoft isn't "using others to do the hard work of market discovery." Activision Blizzard has a USD$72b market cap.
That's a hyperscaled conglomerate attempting to buy a still-huge company.
And if you want to suggest Microsoft's behavior is unique in that... I'd suggest we start with redressing the lax competitive laws that (a) make Microsoft feel it needs to do that to compete with its rivals & (b) allow Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard.
One reason I am pessimistic about Arm's future is they will struggle to balance raising money for future needed R&D without creating the appearance of being too lucrative a target for a nVidia or SoftBank wanting to play monopoly. That is going to push people to RISC-V. I hope they manage to do something, but they're in for a rough time.
Exactly this.
(I wonder what answers you would get?)
I mean, Britain has many great technologists if you're willing to count the likes of Arkwright (died 1792), Babbage (died 1871), Watt (died 1819), Faraday (died 1867), Randall (died 1984), Bell (died 1922), Harrison (died 1776), Logie Baird (died 1946), Stephenson (died 1848) etc
But some would say if a country's list of technology greats has so many dead people on it, perhaps that country's glory days are over.
This is burned into my brain. because I heard a joke when the redesign came out about him going from not being accepted by his country to not being accepted in Lidl. (£50 notes are often refused in the UK for fear of counterfeit.)
They wouldn't remember Tim Berners-Lee's actual name but they would be able to say, the web guy. (Which is probably better for him when he goes shopping).
But yes, few people who actually _build_ things, get to be famous public figures. Possibly due to being too busy to engage with the media nonsense or even worse social media nonsense.
None of them would recognise Eben Upton (except as Jason Statham)
I don't know if I buy your point about inherited wealth but there is what I'd describe as a stifling culture of rentseeking that, if not actively encouraged is certainly tolerated and overlooked, at many levels of society, and across both businesses and public organisations. And once you become aware of it you start to realise how obnoxious and oppressive it is.
We certainly don't lack for talent, but we're very good at suppressing or wasting it.
Incidentally, the Royal Family themselves privately own 1/250th of the UK's land, and it is mostly not particularly valuable. Only about £15bn.
As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?
The Duke of Westminster (not a member of the royal family) has a physically much smaller (private) estate that is worth more than half of the royal estate.
What the royal family own privately should not be confused with what the "Crown" owns. The Crown estate is basically owned and operated by the state.
If anything, I feel like the speed (or how recently the land was acquired) is actually in the Emmersons favour here. A generation or two ago somebody got wildly successful, vs. land being inherited because your 30x great-grandfather was Henry VIII.
Charles himself will only have income from his estate (whereas his mother had income from the Civil List)
What I meant to say is that in the blink of an eye, realistically -- in a couple of generations -- you could and probably will have a situation where a single land-owning family in the USA could end up with a very similar proportion of a _vastly_ larger country.
It's probably in the nature of land-owning for this to happen: someone ends up with all of it, then can't maintain it, and it ends up being sold off or dispensed to the state, then sold off, reaccumulated, and the circle continues.
And I think it's a mistake to see the royal family's land ownership as a source of power and influence. Unfortunately we give them the power and influence for no really good reason; the land is a side thing.
Realistically, once someone owns everything, they'd never ever have to sell. Because they could just rent it out temporarily for the same price. Demand isn't that flexible and in absence of other sellers, where else would a would-be buyer take their money?
The UK is a marvel that it manages to cultivate such an incredible creative scene in the shadow of the rent seeking mediocrity.
[0] I'm sure there are exceptions: in fact I know there are. There are always exceptions. 20-odd years ago for a while I shared a flat with a couple of guys where the private landlord deliberately charged far below market rent in order to be able to offer affordable accommodation to people who weren't well off. Good people, the family that owned that place.
You just described the capital markets in the entire western Europe, not just the brits.
If you look past the tech bubble economies where the "new money" owners are, and into the world of physical assets, what you find is a constellation of families concentrating wealth, swirling around the central families of the 21st Century -- the Waltons, the Mars family, the Kochs, and so on down -- a power series of family wealth that has ordinary investors in the long tail.
The USA is easily distracted by the vibrancy of the market-driven tech economy, and hoodwinked into ignoring the astonishing growth of private equity controlled by inherited wealth.
The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment.
The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained.
Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything.
I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-...
Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.
Was that because it was owned by a government treaty with France? Neither country could cancel without the other.
The final result was way overbudget and not a market fit, but a bunch of skills and technology went on to Airbus.
* The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there.
* Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs.
* For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long.
* Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky.
* A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life.
* More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters.
* Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad.
* One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card.
* It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with.
* Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here.
Our current government is indifferent to this.
Our Prime Minister thought getting the Royal Mint to produce NFTs was a good idea. In 2022.
A lot of US funds have restrictions as to how much they can invest outside the US.
So if you are a US pension fund that has all it's funds in Nigeria ( to pick an example ) - can it be said to be safe under US law?
Ironically the inverse problem EU countries have with US tech firms holding their citizens data - however it that case the response is generally 'la la la'.
I'm not sure that's relevant. ARM is listing American Depository Shares, so this is still usually viewed as an international investment.
In fact the SEC says
'ADRs allow U.S. investors to invest in non-U.S.companies '
That's nothing to do with it - the company is only listing on NASDAQ - ARM has office all over the world but will still be based and managed in the UK along with most of its employees (engineers) like when it was owned by a Japanese company.
Listing on the tech heavy NASDAQ rather than the LSE gives the company more access to investors that are likely to buy shares: retail, commercial, and hundreds of index trackers and funds - increasing the share price.
Listing on the LSE relegates you to "international" funds, which make up a third or less of most portfolios. These have historically lagged US fund performance, quite significantly in the last ten years.[1]
[0] https://www.etf.com/etfanalytics/etf-finder
[1] https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/revisiting-case-internati...
Finding a place to rent on the other hand is still difficult, particularly without a history of renting in the UK
This almost certainly required a personal guarantee (the friend would have to promise to repay the loan in the case the LLC could not).
There must be some benefit for governments to make such a request.
What about indexes? If they qualify for NASDAQ or some other major index, there's some "mandatory" investment that gets triggered by a bunch of funds that do index tracking.
I would presume where you choose to list is kind of a flag of convenience, like it is in maritime. It's probably not as irrelevant as to where things actually happen as flying the Liberian flag or incorporating in Delaware but I'd bet it's close.
Yes, and yes.
> What about indexes? If they qualify for NASDAQ or some other major index, there's some "mandatory" investment that gets triggered by a bunch of funds that do index tracking.
NASDAQ is an exchange, not an index.
The most prominent index on NASDAQ is the QQQ, the top 100 stocks,market cap weighted.
But this is the big boy playground, the smallest stocks in QQQ should have at least $400B marketcap. ARM by the most optimistic estimation should be 1/10th of that.
QQQ is an index fund:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invesco_QQQ
That follows the Nasdaq-100 index:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasdaq-100
There are other funds that track it too from companies other than Invesco.
To further explain, in most financial jargon, one often call an index by its (historically) most traded tracking fund. That is, the NASDAQ 100 is often called the QQQ, the S&P 500 is often called "spider" (SPDR), etc.
But you're 100% right, in a comment about vocabulary, jargon has no place.
Unstable government.
High tax.
Questionable access to other markets.
Questionable reliability when it comes to international agreements (which is pretty fucking vital to a company like AIM).
It's sad (I'm a londoner) but the UK cannot blame anyone but our selves. We're just going through the national equivalent of a tantrum.
What justifies such crazy increase in value? Also, I believe Nvidia overpaid for the company regardless. Nvidia was willing to pay $40b because they want a world-class CPU design team to integrate their GeForce IP into SoCs and service chips.
But a standalone ARM is not very valuable. The reason is that ARM's business model (licensing core designs and ISA) makes peanuts compared to Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc. In addition, ARM's biggest customers are also their biggest competitors. For example, Apple competes with stock ARM designs with Apple Silicon. Qualcomm will be competing with ARM designs via Nuvia chips. Ampere Computing just designed a custom ARM core of their own.
When ARM only license the ISA (Apple Silicon, Nuvia, and Ampere One), they make peanuts. When they license ARM core designs, they make slightly more than peanuts.
It's generally not a good business to invest in. I find it hard to justify the $60b - $70b valuation. No doubt Softbank will try to sell ARM as an AI company. It's not.
i agree.
> Arm reported $524 million in net income on $2.68 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2023, which ended in March
i find the current valuation ludicrous, and it seems like it's pushed more by Softbank's Vision Fund than a firm grasp in reality.
>i find the current valuation ludicrous, and it seems like it's pushed more by Softbank's Vision Fund than a firm grasp in reality.
Just for comparison, AMD, which is still quite small, gets about $2b - $4b annual net profit. Intel, before their recent disaster quarters, had as much as $24b in annual net profit.
$524m in net income is peanuts compared to the big boys. This is what I was saying in my original post. ARM is a more valuable company if they were acquired by Nvidia. As a standalone company, it's not that great. Again, a weird quirk of ARM is that their biggest customers are also their biggest competitors. This puts a cap on how much profit they can make. If ARM decides to raise licensing fees exponentially, which is likely not simple due to long-term contracts, then companies will seriously look to RISC-V.
Because ARM is the smallest fish in the pond, it can't pay for the best engineers. The best chip engineers will go to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, and startups. ARM is where these companies go to poach.
It seems a bit like Linux to me - you could say Linus Torvalds is disappointing because he's not as rich as Elon Musk and yet one might argue both that he has done more and that if he had tried to get super rich out of it he would not have achieved so much because every effort to extract significant money would have lessened the breadth of his impact. People wouldn't have co-operated.
I haven't looked into all their changes in detail but they're not just going to suddenly increase profit without their customers fighting back.
(page 18, FY2023)
96% gross profit margin? Ahh to be an IP licensing company....why would anyone invest in building physical things when there are opportunities like this out there! </s>
edit: clarify gross profit margin
Net income: 0.524 bb
So 19.6% profit margin. Still nice.
I think your math refers to operating margin, that's after they subtract all the operating overheads which are fixed, and not proportional to sales volume. In other words a 96% gross margin means they have virtually no friction to increasing sales.
Compare to Intel statement [2], they have a 35.8% gross margin and a negative operating margin this year, which would be the apples to apples comparison against 96% gross margin and 19.6% operating margin in the F1.
My read on the income line is they do a good job of 'spending money', but they are signaling that can be turned into things like dividends to shareholders once they IPO, perhaps by doing short sighted things like cutting R&D expenses and/or accounting tricks.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin
[2] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1637/...
(S-1 is for domestic corporations and F-1 is for foreign ones)
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1973239/000119312523...
"Arm China is 25% of our revenue, but we have no control over them, they have failed to pay us in the past resulting in us taking on additional costs to recover the money, also we have no way of knowing what they actually owe us and other than what they say, which has already been a problem"
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/In-Depth-How-SoftBa...
Having myself been part of a joint venture with the Chinese (in the education space), and having a Chinese employee go rogue, I only advise against western firms (even large ones with clout) from engaging in such ventures. The Chinese will take control by any means necessary and bleed you dry from the inside.
Nope, the F-1 addresses this: "Neither we [Arm] nor SoftBank Group control the operations of Arm China, which operates independently of us. "
One option is to embrace it as an opportunity. ARM designs some pretty good CPU cores, so imagine they offered good RISC-V cores as well. RISC-V can be free, but a lot of companies still license core designs.
For a SoC (or bigger uC) include both ARM & RISC-V cores. They can work side by side, be used as development platform for either, share memory or peripherals included in the SoC (or perhaps share different but overlapping subsets of those resources). Or a Big.Little style setup where the "Big" and "Little" are different ISA.
Where utilising chip resources 100% is not too important (like, in most applications), designers could simply work with the ISA cores they're comfortable with. Switch use to the other cores, use the same peripherals.
Would this be difficult to work with? Unlikely. Software support for such setups exists, suitable defaults / boot settings & go.
At the very least this would get ARM foot in the door if it turns out RISC-V eating ARMs market share (which is already happening, be it limited scale so far). Or collect the 'ARM tax' for SoCs whose designers wanted RISC-V but don't mind including ARM as well.
This is the approach MIPS took. They deprecated their legacy ISA, embracing the industry-standard RISC-V.
Problem is, ARM's management hasn't shown any signs of actually being capable of doing this. It would have to be replaced, and the business model would need a deep redesign.
But everything hardware takes a long time. Can ARM survive until they have competitive RISC-V designs ready?
I will not bet on that.
Forget it, Jake. It’s China.
I wonder how many of those are buried in landfill now.
(okay, maybe this is an exaggeration, but these small things are pretty much everywhere... not even speaking about chips in other, more complex devices)
In other words, nearly all of them.
I've started calling it "Landfill Boot".
“Despite our significant reliance on Arm China through our commercial relationship with them, both as a source of revenue and as a conduit to the important [Chinese] market, Arm China operates independently of us,” the prospectus warned, adding that Arm did not have any direct management rights or the right to representation on Arm China’s board.
They have designed a processor architecture that is RISC-style. For some companies, ARM sells the design and others manufacture the chip. So what do Apple and Qualcomm get out of it, if they design their own architecture? Is apple tacking on proprietary extensions or instructions?
Why didn't apple design a CPU architecture from the ground up ala RISC-V?
An ISA is the Instruction Set Architecture, the interface between software and hardware.
A microarchitecture is a hardware implementation of an ISA.
RISC-V is an ISA.
ARM is a company that has both an ISA (actually several, but their current is ARMv9) and a bunch of microarchitectures.
Their business model is to license their IP:
- They may license you a microarchitecture, so that you can include it in your chip's design.
- They may license you the ISA, so you can implement your own microarchitecture for the ISA. Note that you can't then license your microarchitecture to others, that's ARM's sole privilege.
RISC-V's instruction space has some room for custom extensions. Thus it can be adapted to find specific needs, without asking for permission nor opting out of the strongest software ecosystem which RISC-V is rapidly building.
But while RISC-V is pretty good technically, enabling the best processors, what's most disruptive is that it is an open ISA.
It means there's now an open market with RISC-V microarchitectures to license, from a range of vendors. There's also some open source microarchitectures.
Microarchitecture licensing aside, there's an ecosystem of companies offering related services, such as helping you verify your designs, trace your code and so on.
Reads like FUD, as you go on to list a bunch of items that RISC-V actually already delivers.
Point per point:
>long term support
Is achieved via upstreaming drivers[0] and providing documentation[1], something that e.g. StarFive is doing much better than Raspberry Pi ever has.
>strong software ecosystem support
RISC-V is rapidly building the strongest ecosystem.
>performance parity
JH7110 SoC used in boards like VisionFive 2 provides CPU performance between Raspberry Pi 3b and 4, at much lower power consumption.
TH1520 SoC used in boards like Sipeed Lichee Pi4A[2] provides performance above Raspberry Pi 4.
Both SoCs provide faster GPU (JH7110 is 4x that of Pi 4, TH1520 is faster), better hardware video codec blocks, cryptography acceleration, faster memory interface, faster I/O outside of the SoC and otherwise better and more built in peripherals.
Note: Raspberry Pi have been used as reference points as they are, by far, the most popular ARM SBCs.
>It'll be a few more years
As proven above, it's already there against the Raspberry Pi line.
But next year it'll be better, as RISC-V will finally compete with the fastest cores available. This is based solely on what's already announced (Ascalon, Veyron, P570 and so on).
RISC-V enables the best processors.
0. https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan
That's not what ARM thinks[0].
>There is nothing inevitable about RISC V.
As it turns out, the decisions have long been made, and RISC-V has been chosen.
0. https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/risc-v-part-2-ambitious...
Lots of companies have made their decisions, projects are kicking off -- for example Samsung just started porting .NET and Tizen to RISC-V for use in their future TVs and other products. LG similarly. It will take five years for the products resulting from that to emerge, but they are coming.
The RISC-V ISA didn't even formally exist as a frozen spec a little over four years ago. Ratification in July 2019 was the starting gun for many to start projects. The results of that are just emerging in the last months -- the VisionFive 2, tne Lichee Pi 4A, the 64 core Milk-V Pioneer.
A lot more things have gone into the pipeline since then, and will be emerging in the next two to three years. Things up to around Apple M1 performance ... from multiple companies.
I assume regulators would block a hostile takeover like they would a regular buyout if there are concerns regarding market power?
This idea that they have a special license keeps getting thrown about.
But nobody has ever been able to provide any proof or otherwise reference a believable source.
Until proven otherwise, it's a myth.
Quite honestly, ARM falling on its face hard is actually a benefit to Apple. That would mean that Apple Silicon and iPhone SoCs have less competition. Imagine if Qualcomm chips based on ARM designs are 5 years behind instead of the 2-3 years now.
But the Nvidia + ARM combo made sense from a technical and strategic standpoint though.
Made sense for Nvidia. Not for other Arm customers.
You answered your own question:
> Quite honestly, ARM falling on its face hard is actually a benefit to Apple. That would mean that Apple Silicon and iPhone SoCs have less competition.
Sure, but the question was "why would Apple want to own ARM", not "is it worth the cost?"
> it doesn't guarantee that ARM would fall on its face after the acquisition because it has long-term contracts
Having full control of the company would guarantee that as much as any other method could by a mirroring argument, as far as I can see.
Let us know what other genius ways you can think of.
Was. They're now at Qualcomm.
Very, very unlikely anyone would get a perpetual license that covers all future products just because they were a founding shareholder.
I did some detective work on this a while ago for my newsletter (link in bio) from behind the paywall:
> … Apple and Acorn were paying royalty fees soon after they founded the company why should that change to grant Apple a royalty-free license at some point later?