
Not going to happen
And the best thing is the public will never know why.
It's not like the UK really needed them anyway. After all they'd have to be fabbing in femtoinches too.
The UK government is continuing efforts to have chip designer and licensor Arm listed on the London Stock Exchange after its public offering rather than New York, as is the current plan. At stake is whether Arm moves its headquarters to the US, potentially leading to the further loss of UK jobs. Speaking to the Financial …
...how the business side of the company is gradually dominating the technology, the latter being just a vehicle for generating cashflow?
If the UK government had its head screwed on (rather than lurking in some comfortable dark and warm place) it would be effectively writing off ARM as a "British" technology company and looking around to foster a RISC-V operation or two. But their focus is, as ever, on the finance aspects with the lucrative percentages that could be creamed off any dealings, the ability ot leverage and so on. Another missed opportunity, IMHO -- after all, as ARM gradually sheds talent it would be useful to have something to sweep it up with.
Yes, there is that notion in the government that UK is ARM and that's it. The conditions under which ARM has become ARM no longer exist. There is not going to be another ARM in the UK, nor RISC-V, because the economy has been designed to outsource everything to China or India. If you wanted to develop anything in the country, you would get eaten by taxes and regulations.
What would a business model of a RISC-V company look like? This is not a snarky comment, I'm genuinely interested.
ARM made it's money out of developing an architecture and then licensing that out to tech companies with deep pockets. It owns both the architecture IP as the IP to its reference designs and everyone (bar three or so companies) just license a reference design off ARM to use in their kit.
If some new company stood up and build something around RISC-V they wouldn't own the architecture IP as that's public. Would they then have to compete in creating the best reference designs and license that to others? Would they have to go into building own fabs?
The reality is that thanks to government measures hostile to small, medium business and freelancing the pool of valuable talent is dwindling. People who have brains know that living in the UK with its extremely high taxes is a rip off. I mean, I am sure people wouldn't mind paying but if one does not get value for money after a while you feel like a mug.
Like when you become a victim of a burglary, you'll get lucky if police even come and have look or when you get sick - good luck getting an appointment with a GP. Sure you can pay for private security or get private health insurance, but you cannot deduct these costs from your taxes.
Or do you want to put your business idea to test? Complex regulations, IR35, business rates and a ton of other road blocks, that are easy for a big corporation with accountants and solicitors on a speed dial to deal with. But for little people? Forget it.
The government idea of people running small business is a small caffe or selling hats from China. High tech is reserved for party donors and their corporations and valuable people are leaving for the US and other countries.
There's a lot of whining tosh being spouted in this thread.
The stock exchange where ARM gets registered will rake in its commissions whether ARM flies or dies.
Due to an accident of geography, the City of London is the only major international financial centre where you can cut a deal across the world, from Tokyo to Frankfurt to California, in a single working day. The Franco-German alliance which runs the EU tried to usurp that and undermined the City every which way it could. Brexit has given the City the opportunity for a new lease of life, and this Tory government is doing its best to help that along.
ARM is too big for yesterday's betrayed City perhaps, but not for tomorrow's resurgent dreams.
As ever in the Capitalist world of high capital stakes, you pays your money and you takes your choice.
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Apparently you found a source to say:
"If Arm lists on the Nasdaq or the Dow Jones there is a requirement to move the HQ to the USA," the source told us. "If it lists on the FTSE100 at its current valuation it would be the ninth biggest company listed".
Which leads one to conclude that your source is not the smartest tool in the shed...
The NASDAQ is an exhange.
The Dow Jones (Industrial Average) is a benchmark index of how a group of 30 "blue chip" companies are doing. You can't "list" on it. And it includes companies (like "Microsoft", who are traded on the NASDAQ exchange).
The FTSE100 is a similar benchmark index (although somewhat more sophisticated in its structure than the DJIA). Again, you can't list on it.
I suspect they meant the NYSE and LSE instead of Dow Jones & FTSE100, but who knows?
Also, "being the 9th biggest company listed" is factually incorrect (if it's valued at $60B, that puts it at 13th, above Anglo American at $59B), but no-one really cares. If the Dow Jones Publishing Company decided to include ARM (should it be traded on the NYSE or the NASDAQ) as part of the DJIA, it would be... 28th (after Boeing). But as I said, no-one cares: if you look at the Tokyo equivalent of the FTSE100 (the Nikkei 225), guess who's at number 10 (and for whom that's not an obvious problem)??
There are London brokers whose commission depends on Arm listing on the LSE - that's worth them putting scare stories out about head office locations but the truth is Arm has been operating out of the US for a while now because it's beneficial to do so - Arm's worldwide office is already in the US, it's in San Jose. Some board members are based there.
Being a semiconductor business Arm was quite rightly global in outlook from the outset. You lot already know this: the concept was from the US (RISC) as were the design tools (from VLSI which won them 8% of the shares) as was all the start-up capital (all from Apple resulting in a 46% shareholding) and even the IP was from a company 60% Italian owned as Olivetti owned most of Acorn when ARM span out. Assuming the remaining 40% of Acorn was all UK owned, then 40% of 46% - I make that a less than 19% British owned ARM at conception and even later when it went to SoftBank, Robin Saxby reckoned it was still only 40% British in ownership.
Yet there it still is, on the Fulbourn Road. Personally I'm really, really relaxed about where it lists and the nationality of the new owners because it's literally all global now, it has been since the Seventies. And if the new owner messes up? It will be a repeat of what happened with Acorn: a massive seed-pod of talent bursting over the Cambridge technology sector.
As a former small ARM shareholder prior to SoftBank I had no option to keep my shares and was forced to sell as ARM was being delisted from the UK's AIM (part of LSE).
I owned the shares because I loved the company not because of profits, and wanted it to stay UK based.
This crap now is what happens when clueless Tories wave through strategic assets sell offs, despite expert advice, and then later backtrack when public realise they've f'd up.
ARM was a massive boost to this country and they dropped the ball. After the ARM China farce there's no way that company is coming back from this in its original form.
Now I'm just going to wait for the Raspberry PI Foundation to list (which has been hinted).