UK govt considers invoking national security in Arm IPO saga The UK government is upping the ante in attempts to have Arm listed on the London stock exchange, with reports suggesting it is considering the threat of national security laws to force the issue with owner SoftBank. According to the Financial Times, the British administration is considering whether to apply the National …
>The idea that this is some kind of national security thing
Wait till 3 year olds find out about this option.
I wanna ice cream........
You can't have an ice cream until you've eaten your dinner
I need an ice cream ... because of national security
OK, here you are
This is so patently stupid what they do I have no words.
If you want to keep someone by force, it will never end up well. You will build resentment and the person is still going to leave.
Why not build an economy where the business could thrive? For instance better laws for freelancing (scrapping IR35), lower taxes, scrapping business rates and so on.
If we lose ARM, it does not mean something better couldn't be build, but not in this low wage high tax economy.
Government vision of small business is a caffe, hairdresser or a bakery, everything else should be outsourced to China. There is nothing for a chip plant seed to grow.
It does seem like Softbank didn't do their homework on Arm - did they not know the ROI was going to be 'relatively' low because of RnD costs?
And I do wonder if Softbank aren't being a little greedy too - I wouldn't mind $2-3B arriving in my bank account every year!
I think Softbank could change the business model. They could put the ISA into a foundation, and companies could pay a fee to the foundation to use the ISA, which would cover RnD. Then Arm itself could be freed to become a design company, and go after the funding for doing what they want to do.
(It will be interesting to see if Qualcomm's suggestion of a consortium will be acceptable to the World's governors.)
Why not build an economy where the business could thrive
Without commenting on your specific recipe, there is increasing concern amongst the grown-ups that Britain has abandoned any pretence of having a strategy on anything: the economy, food, transport, energy, health, education are all being left to rot and they only get any attention if they can be exploited to highlight a "wedge" issue that will merit a Daily Mail headline. There is simply no will to engage with reality.
Add to that the constant threats to overthrow agreed trading relationships and the pernicious effect is a stark decline in investment in the UK because the business environment is chaotically unstable.
The country (after all it voted multiple times for this outcome) has deliberately created an economy in which business cannot thrive and neither of the two principal political parties are prepared to acknowledge this. Until they do, we'll see increasingly desperate attempts at distraction that will simply make things worse.
"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.
Don't listen to this source in the future as they are wrong on both counts. NASDAQ has no such requirement. Dow Jones is not an exchange where companies are listed, it is a calculated index of 30 US based stocks. Even if ARM were based in the US it would probably a year or 2 before it might be included in the index.
After 40 years of "Let the markets decide". It seems that that's okay until we don't like what the market decides. :/
Note that, for all the hand wringing, the government is still not concerned enough to buy arm (as Hauser encouraged them to). Perhaps it's the right decision : perhaps Tim Cook's announcement in 2020 was Arm's zenith, what with Arm's neutrality in question and the rise of RISC-V... perhaps it's all down hill from here for them - not a popular thought here, I'd guess.
I agree with others here that Arm isn't a security concern (save GCHQ having a back door that none of us know about).
I don't think it's of strategic national interest either. There are ISA alternatives.
It's just reflected kudos in the design of an ISA which borrowed heavily on the work done by universities in the USA. A design which only became popular off the back of a successful American company.
What is the national security question?
As ARM is already owned by "foreign nationals" we (UK Govt) have no control over its output so silicon security isn't the issue. The only "national interest" I can see is the tax/profits made by the Stock Exchange which line the pockets of the very rich ... oh, I think I just answered my own question.
That'll be fun when the US government asks why the UK considers a listing for a UK based company on their stock exchange to be a threat to Britain's national security.
I mean, it's embarrassing for the government in that it shows how their casual stupidity has let a successful company go, but that's only a threat to the current government's popularity, and despite the way they behave as if their party interest and the national interest are one and the same thing, I think we'll be far more secure in many ways once the current crop of imbeciles are voted out.
I'm sure most of us would agree, but whom to replace them with? Let's face it, none of the options much improvement.
I suppose kicking the current morons to the kerb would be a good start, though. At least give benefit of the doubt to whatever replacement gets in.
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