Re: Options for Much Silliness
Well their CEO is a salesman
173 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2022
I wonder if it is to do with the fact that ARM doesn't make the best ARM cores anymore. Apple showed the world what vertical integration can do and Nuvia/Qualcomm showed the appetite to move away from ARMs constantly late designs. Seems defensive that they want to collect their pound of flesh when the inevitable happens.
You'll see a lot of naysayers come to say how RISC-V is no viable alternative at ARM, seems to be the old guard in ARM likely who are sipping the koolaid and spreading such FUD online. As much as the maturity of the arm ecosystem is concerned customers don't really like being shown such malicious contempt. The time for greed in the market is long gone. ARM can't deliver the performance it thinks anymore as Apple and Nuvia have shown. So it makes sense that ARM try and double dip now.
Most of ARMs chips don't come from performant chips either, it's your deeply embedded washing machine controller, or switches where the volume is gained. If they have only servers and phones to rely on, well that is not a massive growth market.
Didn't ARM already do this a few years ago or is this yet another price hike, or regurgitation of the same old news. The revenue model is certainly different for sure, and despite what ARM said, was accurate about how Qualcomm said they were charging the OEMs instead, not licensees.
Let's not forget that Softbank paid a little over 50% the asking price for ARM at the time, where they had $1.4bn in revenue. Now ARM allegedly has $2.7bn in revenue, so barely double the revenue, a hiked license fee and declining licensees as they no longer need to hedge against NVIDIA acquiring ARM, then there is the ARM china debacle. So in this market I would wager Softbank is barely about to break on their ARM purchase, doesn't seem like they are going to cover all the other bad bets. Word on the street is though that Softbank will cash out a portion of employees RSUs at the $60bn market cap, as if to say to the market that they are worth that much. That is bound to be a very high P/E ratio whatever way you swing it.
It seems the horse has already bolted and all there is left in ARM is useless middle-managers with a propensity for meetings who are all likely watery-eyed as they look at their mortage repayments in Cambridge once their mortages are up for renewal soon. I guess they need those cash out options and are tightly held by those golden handcuffs. Let's hope ARM doesn't trim more of the fat.
They'll need to steal a lot more IP and embed their party members in organisations around the world to collect more info and experience. I see it a real possibility as western organisations soon being unable to employ people with that nationality or keep their organisations ring-fenced to prevent exposure to spies.
We'll see how that mixes with the current western corporate diversity lip-service when push comes to shove. Western countries are already struggling to make chips, at best the current generation of engineers are only able to modify mature designs, not create something fully fledgling, so I doubt China will have much luck either with or without 50 years of Silicon Wager fabrication behind them.
The leadership is all in the US now and so will much of the flagship development. Having worked there the US workers are absolutely gobsmacked how unproductive the Cambridge site was, so many meetings week in week out and so little getting done outside them. Principal engineers getting paid six figures just to bounce from meeting to meeting talking about processes, standards and committees.
I suppose when most of your revenue comes from royalties on long forgotten IP you can afford to do this, and just hike the price when the IPO is on the horizon.
I wasn't intending to praise Cambridge, it's just the reality that companies have consolidated here or tried to open small satellite offices, you've got 5 big name companies all within 500m of one another at the train station. But the culture in Cambridge is reflective of the UK tech scene in general, the only way to get to a 500k house is getting a management position, through your friends and alumni network and it turns out to be an old boys club, tech workers are exploited and not even on 40k and quickly leave, the better negotiators can get to 80k/90k, but still, there is many unseen networks in such a small city.
ARM Cambridge is representative of this, lots of product managers and very few skilled CPU designers. Everyone wants to be a manager because the UK class system dictates that "manager" is higher up the importance and salary ladder as someone with 15 years of in-depth experience. Very few have the chops to keep up in something as competitive as computing these days. We are seeing Intel and IBM in the late stage of this culture and the results are not pretty.
Nothing but deluded oxbridge BA graduates in the Cabinet room, so no surprises there. Even go to the tech capital of the UK, Cambridge where ARM is headquartered and you will find nothing but out of touch upper-middle class folk from the private school system in leadership positions well beyond their skill level. It's an old boys club and anyone with talent is exploited and underpaid to keep the class system structures in place.
All ARM's serious designs are done in the US for that reason and their little cores will probably follow suit. 110 Fulbourn road is full of do-nothing jobsworths and middle managers and Softbank hasn't copped on that all the real talent got fed up and left years ago.
They have published their intent to hold a meeting on how to proceed with their initiative, yet to be decided upon which feedback from industry consultants will outline the need for the strategy to later be ratified and drafted following review be all necessary committes and legislators upon which industry leaders will be consulted on which ..........
The paradox of paying people barely enough to afford living in London is that you can't threaten them with anything because they don't have mortage payments to keep up with, because you neve paid them a salary that qualifies them for a 500k house. Bring them back into the office but pay them the average house price / 4 and subsidise their season ticket. Still want to bring them into the office?
Tech companies in Europe and US are all having their secrets stolen from loyalist chinese employees. They have enforcement officers to keep their ex-pats in check all over the world too, so they don't even need to be loyalist party members, just people who don't want to have their family disappear.
I've noticed chinese colleagues very interested in work they shouldn't naturally ever need to understand on the critical part of IP too.
None of these export controls work whilst Chinese nationals work on them or close to them and most big tech companies would rather not be racist than to protect their IP. Either way I think few actually care because they have written off China as a lost market
We have plenty of IP companies that can neutrally sell to anywhere in the midst of a trade war except we decided to pick sides so a few US corporations would open some offices in the UK and only hire imported talent to keep costs down.
Let the Americans and Chinese fight over the semiconductor gold rush and lets just sell them shovels.
Does anyone think it's suspicious that this whole ChatGPT thing is was hyped right as the entire Tech bubble popped and the layoffs started in the midst of stagnant revenues and lower projected earnings?
It's certainly a nifty new piece of tech that I've used for rephrasing my CV and high level and abstract technical questions. But I suspect it's going to be the next buzzword to ensure investment keeps flowing into these tech monopolies and inflate the share prices now that free cash flow is reducing and can't be spent on buybacks.
Some of these stocks that got hammered are up 30% in 2 months with no upside in earnings expected for a year at least.
Wasn't this guy paid $180m according to recent headlines, whether that is stock/cash split I don't think it matters at those levels. That is a third of the companies losses. Why the F does he care about Intel anymore? And why do his next 10 ancestors for that matter. It's just the same problem for these boomer led shitfests that are failing semiconductor companies. It would be fine if there were consequences at the top level, but the reality is they will just cry for more handouts from Uncle Sam rather than be forced to innovate and restructure their entire culture.
Roll on AMD earnings. I'm long $AMD.
We don't want Intel removed. We want the layers of sycophants removed so top talent can be afforded and left to actually produce competitive products. Sadly when a corporation wins so severely to becoming almost a monopoly, all the grey suits and accountants swoop in and you get what Intel has now become. 1 Engineer doing the work and 10 mid level managers telling them how.
It's a simple formula.
Is the tech/semiconductor company British?
If so can it be sold to USA/China/Other?
If so are the management and significant shareholders one of the Good Old Boys and Tory Members/Donors?
Is it enriching for those above?
If so it will be sold off, if not it will be left to flounder.
These things you speak of rarely happen in-office as well.
Why go above and beyond when you get the same departmental pay rise irregradless of performance, promotions are just excuses to allocate more work and the cost of having a house rapidly goes further out of reach.
Sadly the UK is choc full of out of touch boomers running the political system and most of the businesses.
Top companies pay top salaries and allow people to WFH. Unless the article is accounting for the same role in the same organisation then the research only tells us what we already know.
The only companies in the UK tech field not allowing WFH are the poor performing ones that uncoincidentally are choc full of washed up boomers that don't understand inflation or why people are looking to WFH in the first place.
He's an MBA from a wealthy family, I have noticed a lot of people from wealthy families doing this, and in particular immigrant families, likely because they have to distinguish themselves much more, although not exclusive it seems he is not unique in his endeavours, it is a life script reserved only for those of the wealthy irregardless of race:
Private School-> Top University -> Banking/Consulting -> MBA -> CEO/Prime Minister
I would certainly applaud the work ethic and priorities of these families but at the same time all we are presented with is a bunch of out of touch MBAs running the world who have never had to manage anything tough in their life and only know how to manage the expansion of managerial complexity to promote themselves, they do not create and ride the waves of economic phases and the last 12 years of loose economic policy has produced a LOT of people overconfident in their own abilities.
They are all empire builders in the Game of Thrones that is the modern tech bubble.
Happening every tech company now. I think the FAANG era is well and truly dead, godfathers of the Google search function were systematically given the boot. I suspect a LOT of that talent is now free to go and help startups starved of talent due to the big tech hegemony. They are much more costs focused now that their headline growth is likely to be in the single digits.
12 years of cheap capital and stock buybacks may have inflated CEOs earnings and boosted stock which for some bizarre reason was the main aspect of their perceived performance. 6 months of moderate interest rates and all of that goes up in flames.
Sounds like these interest rates are having the desired affect and the bottom line matters again.
"It does feel like an acquisition with extra steps. Or makes us wonder what's holding Redmond back from swallowing up the AI lab."
Experience from their Activision saga no doubt? Mergers and Acquisitions at this level rarely work well and more than likely they think it will get blocked, best to just invest and let the experts do their job rather than destroy their talent with your army of middle-managers
My money is on ARM coming out of this bout better off than qualcomm, they win the battle but I doubt they win the war. The company has fallen apart under Softbank and RISC-V has just completely swallowed a lot of their M-class business which makes a lot of their licensing and royalty revenue. They cannot afford to lose smartphones or servers to other peoples implementations.
Well most of those are at FAANG and Fintech startup companies where your job in 2023 is not exactly safe from the scrutiny of the analysis and application of basic business fundamentals. There are far more jobs well below that compensation and less and less at these levels as the economic headwinds bite.
By the end of this decade there will be a whole new round of companies paying these levels but I suspect more often than not they won't be at FAANG companies.
It's the usual drivel from the brexit gammon crowd. Arm develops all over the world mainly their A class cores in the USA.
The only thing stopping them from consolidating more to the US is because they are well behind market rate out there and had hired far too many since the acquisition which they are no longer bound to.
Oh dear. All of their plays since 2016 have been complete flops and it seems they will now try and micromanage arms leadership. Oh well, I guess that culture doesn't even let the C-suite escape.
Funny how now that he's lost billions he becomes a business developer not just an investor.
It means many licenses were sold to so customers could decouple themselves from an NVIDIA owned ARM who would likely scalp the price and lock you into goodness knows what else.
It also means hardware sales are good up until at least this quarter. Who knows going forward. Likely a glut of hardware soon.