back to article Mysterious firm seeks to buy majority stake in Arm China

The saga surrounding Arm's joint venture in China just took another intriguing turn: a mysterious firm named Lotcap Group claims it has signed a letter of intent to buy a 51 percent stake in Arm China from existing investors in the country. In a Chinese-language press release posted Wednesday, Lotcap said it has formed a …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Popcorn time

    I wonder which 'excellent management team' LotCap is referring to?

    Also if Allen Wu is one of the backers of the bid (which might be a reason for the secrecy)?

  2. Teejay

    Chinese communist party

    My best guess, once again, would be the usual crooks of the Chinese communist party.

    1. razorfishsl

      Re: Chinese communist party

      Yep they MUST hold onto ARM, becasue they have this problem with US tech.

      in china 5% possession by the communist party makes them the owners of hte company, with a majority stake in every board decision...

      oh... and you have to give them the 5% for free, nor is it tax deductible.

      1. Justthefacts Silver badge

        Re: Chinese communist party

        To be fair, in Germany, “workers representatives” have automatic 1/3 or 1/2 representation on the “supervisory board”, which in turn has the power to dismiss the management board in part or whole.

        And most very large French companies have a “Golden Share” owned by the Elysee Palace.

        Other countries don’t have to do things the way the same way as your own. That’s pretty much the definition of a country.

  3. razorfishsl

    Simple ... just close it down.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      How? It's its own company with its own shareholders. ARM is one of those shareholders but only holds 49%. A new shareholder who gets 51% can outvote ARM.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wu has gone

    Shenzen government stopped recognizing the stolen company seal, and agreed to issue a new seal to Liu, one of the two new appointed CEOs. He can talk, but he has nothing, they did not need him to stand down from the company (as Reuters reported) *they* are the company. His "letter from employees" was pathetic.

    So what does he have? He has 16% of the company, he's trying to use as leverage to get appointed CEO again here I think. Which of course would be dumb, because he'll simply treat the company like it's his personal property again.

    At some point, Shenzen has to prosecute for his clear misuse of the seal.

    No doubt, there is more dodgy dealings there, than control of the company. If he misused the seal, then what else did he misuse for his personal gain? Licenses with kickbacks to Macau accounts perhaps? Technical documents sold to competitors perhaps? Who knows. What we know is, he was soooo very desperate to keep control of the company, even as it was destroying it, and making China look like cowboy town, unable to enforce its own laws. Now you have the seal, you need to see what he was hiding.

    I suggest you need financial forensic investigators in there at this point and see what else Wu was abusing beyond the company seal.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wu has gone

      Wu would not have got to the position that he did without governmental support. That he is allowed to still be around after all this fuss just proves the point.

      The only option is for Softbank to accept another executive, and Wu will be appointed at a different company.

      1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

        Re: Wu has gone

        It looks like one of the replacement co-CEOs is the government candidate. The FT has a slightly fuller article about the whole Benny Hill affair.

        And it sounds like Arm were threatening to cut them off from their R&D...

    2. PhilipN Silver badge

      Re: Wu has gone

      Scepticism required when ingesting reports on China from Western media. FT for example prints what is presented as a definitive shareholder breakdown. Underneath the attribution in tiny print is "Sources : Documents seen by the FT; sources". I had better send them some more "sources" I just wrote in wax crayon.

  5. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    FAIL

    Arm China is an independent company

    Didn't Arm realise they had simply given away the ARM IP to the local company? Even though this is a massive warning to any company with one of these "local JVs", i don't expect anything to change much.

    1. BOFH in Training

      Re: Arm China is an independent company

      If Arm International was smart, they would not be providing any new IP to Arm China, so that whatever they managed to grab is what they ended up with.

      Maybe Softbank can consider writing off it's ownership of Arm China (just like some western companies have written off whatever they owned in Russia) and state that Arm China is not permitted to conduct any business on Arm Internationals' behalf.

      That may get Huawei and other China's Arm using companies abit concerned, since at least some of them are already under sanctions, and these may escalate to more sanctions or other legal problems outside China for using "unlicenced IP" or something similar.

    2. Ace2 Silver badge

      Re: Arm China is an independent company

      Companies love to incorporate in Delaware partly because of low taxes but mostly because they have a very clear and consistent body of corporate case law.

      This would seem to be the exact opposite. Sign up for a JV with the CCP, get a legal clown show.

  6. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Stranger things may have happened ..... but maybe not for a long time recently

    In the press release, Lotcap commended Arm China for having "an excellent management team, excellent engineers, excellent customers and an ecosystem," adding that the "future market development potential is very huge," according to an automatic translation.

    Something to bear in mind about any mysterious suitor about which precious little is widely readily available for forensic discovery/enlightening search, is future market development potential and potent development of future markets and/or markets from the future are at least two very different things and necessarily requires access to and competent utility exercised with an extremely rare collection of highly novel skillsets ...... about which naturally there will be a dearth of information/universal intelligence deficit.

    Is that the Lotcap Group's field of excellent expertise/pioneering intellectual property business endeavour or do others lead in such as presents well at both Work, Rest and Play for 0Day AIdVentures?

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