ARM, bet you’ve heard that name before, is a multinational semiconductor and software design company hailing out of Cambridge, England. And the name that you might be familiar with is ARM architecture, with nearly every smartphone, tablet, e-reader and smartwatch using it, ARM architecture is an integral part of the small device era. So ARM Holdings, the company who owns ARM architecture is bound to be important to our age.
Riding on the vision of IOT (Internet of Things), ARM was able to outperform Apple Inc. in the share market, this was bound to attract some attention, and one such attention was shown by Japan’s SoftBank,who has decided to acquire ARM Holdings from UK chip Design Company to fulfill its growing demands of the processor and mobile markets. Softbank will pay $32 billion in cash to get licensed designs from the chip company. This company is supplying its products to mobile makers and IT market.
The decision comes barely weeks after the UK voted to leave the EU, a phenomenon which sent the global financial markets crashing down and Pounds crashing over 10% against the dollar.
It is one of the biggest deal in the tech world, to come out in the last few months, the other being the takeover of Yahoo by Verizon.
It is also noticeable that SoftBank is the parent company of Sprint and earlier this week Sprint’s CEO Marcelo Claure said that deals like Verizon’s Yahoo purchase never work out.
Softbank has made lots of investments in media and technology industry. These Sprint Nextel, ride-hailing app company (Didi Chuxing) in China and retailer Snapdeal in India. ARM would have a big name in technology companies as it will supply licensed designs including Qualcomm gear to the linked devices marketplace.
But Softband acquisitions haven’t always worked out like was the sad case of Aldebaran Robotics, acording to some employees,since the acquisition, Softbank has appropriated all software development inside of Softbank, meaning that much of the software-side of the Aldebaran team has left, including Software Release Director Chris Kilner & Director of Software Engineering Cedric Gestes, who had been with Aldebaran for a long time.
Softbank CEO and Chairman has said, “ARM will be excellent strategic fit as a part of SoftBank group because we invest to get the most significant opportunities provided by the ‘Internet of Things.”
ARM and its partners are interested in growing their business by making use of new possibilities in the markets. They will try to take advantage of other markets like smart cities, connected vehicles and robotics. ARM has acquired Apical, which is providing imaging for next generation smart devices and also embedded computer vision to act intelligently from surrounding. Apical technology will help ARM Mali graphics, video processing road map, and display, as claimed by ARM in May 2016.
Patrick Moorhead, the principal analyst and president at Moor Insights & Strategies, said, “ARM has long-term contracts with customers, so we are not expecting any quick change.” He also said that ARM would have the impact on Samsung, Qualcomm, and Apple finally. He is surprised why ARM was not generated before. Softbank can make more investments in this long-term strategy for the success of ARM products in the marketplace.
Softbank business plan is going to bring a big change in the market of technology as its plans and targets are very high, and significant investments are there to attract customers.
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