SoftBank is nearing a deal to acquire ARM Holdings, the British semiconductor company, said two people briefed on the matter who asked not to be named discussing private information.
The deal would be the first large-scale, cross-border transaction in Britain since it voted to exit the European Union last month. ARM had been seen as a safe haven from the volatility surrounding “Brexit†because its chip technology is used in mobile phones all over the world, with limited revenue derived from Britain.
Remarkable news on such an early Monday morning. One of the larger purchases in the technology world, and of a core and extremely crucial company at that. I’m wondering if the major technology companies are okay with this deal, since many of them rely heavily on ARM’s technology.
“Ok. How much is this gonna cost me?”
i.e. When and by How much will the cost of ARM licenses go up?
IMHO, a price rise is inevitable. Why else would they pay such a premium on the share price? Softbank need to recoup that investment (and more) before they (possibly) decimate the business and walk away leaving just a smoking ruin.
I don’t see any upside to this deal in the long term UNLESS, they are buying it as a proxy for some other unnamed entity. This deal is not in the established business area for Softbank. Why would the risk so much by venturing into this new area?
£24B is a lot of dosh to stump up. Who in the Tech Biz has this sort of cash kept outside the USA just for this sort of thing?
Edited 2016-07-18 05:43 UTC
Why do you think cash is kept outside of the USA?
Because all those US global players are parking their money outside the US because of the taxes.
It is even “cheaper” for them to make debts in the US then getting the money back.
[Edit: Is this true for a Japan based company, maybe.]
Edited 2016-07-18 08:09 UTC
They could be looking to diversify their portfolio – seeing as this mobile network company, a book publishing company, a broadband supplier and a basketball team, a chip designer isn’t so far-fatched. They could be under pressure to do something with their cash reserves.
It remains to be seen how autonomous ARM will be. Japanese management culture doesn’t seem to cope well with the pace of the technology industry these days.
what an odd generalization. There are plenty of Japanese companies who are doing very well indeed. Even without looking at Pokemon go and its massive success
Pokemon Go was created by Niantic, an American company. At least the idea came from the Pokemon Company, although it was inspired by a previous augmented reality game by… Niantic.
Add to that that the coding itself is rather shoddy (I know dozens of people who play it who have regular issues with it hanging, crashing, or just generally misbehaving) and it’s not all that inventive of a game (it’s just geocaching with Pokemon, with a level system tacked on to make it feel competitive). If anything, it would almost reinforce the point that it was brought up to counter, if it were developed by a Japanese company.
so Americans are bad at coding? (that generalization ok too?)
I’d say a more accurate statement is that many people who work for video game companies aren’t good at coding, not just Americans. I find more bugs and other programming issues in video games than any other type of software, although I think that’s partly because the whole industry has been moving towards ‘end user is also beta tester’ mentality, which would be a suicide move in almost any other industry (Evolve immediately, the developers there essentially got people to pay a significant amount of money to be beta testers).
I think it’s being overworked, more than any mentality.
Isn’t it because people spend more time on games than anything else so they find more bugs, and earlier?
/my2cents
If it were insanely obscure stuff that nobody’s likely to hit (like some of the stuff I’ve found in the Metroid Prime Trilogy), then I would kind of understand it. Many of the issues I and my friends come across happen frequently and are _very_ easy to reproduce simply by just doing the same thing repeatedly. For example, it’s a pretty regular occurrence on Pokemon Go right now that the game hangs right after you hit a Pokemon with a Pokeball. My friends who have Android phones have this happen roughly 1% of the time, and my friends who have iPhones have it happen roughly 5% of the time, such error rates in the case of a core game mechanic are absolutely ridiculous.
This is because video games fall into the “code once and throw away” category of coding. That is, the game logic part of a game can be written by rookies with extremely limited experience because it doesn’t have to be reused. As a result students and junior devs write the bulk of it – if not artists themselves in some cases.
Contrast this with the game engines that are written by completely different types of developers. What tend to go wrong is when management thinks that you can use the students to do the server infrastructure coding and such stuff. A classical management mistake where they think all devs are alike.
I don’t entirely buy that. Five or ten years ago I might have, but by no means do I think that’s the cause today. The common case for most of the big games has become either a rolling release cycle with regular updates (like most MOBA games, as well as many MMO’s), or a fixed update schedule that requires buying new versions of the game that often don’t do much to core game-play (like COD and most sports games). In such a case, having reusable code is just as important as it is in most other industries, because your future revenue is dependent on it.
Game companies have never been great at beta testing, but recently more and more is getting through that phase that shouldn’t. Many big companies have moved to continuous integration setups with unit testing and have very few people doing actual beta testing (and in many cases for the games on rolling release cycles, the beta testers are more invested in getting an edge over everyone else than actually testing the game), and this is what I think is really the biggest issue. If you can’t write an AI that can consistently outplay a human, you absolutely can’t write one to test your game thoroughly.
The point at which core game engine components like the renderer or the input subsystem are being broken by game-play updates, something is wrong. I’ve seen this happen in almost every regularly updated game I’ve played over the past two years at least once, and it’s not even indie games, but big stuff like League of Legends, Evolve, and Warframe. It almost always gets fixed quickly (although quickly is often within a week), but the fact that this kind of thing happens at all is absolutely ridiculous.
The messy issue of games being both code and entertainment media.
I was under the impression that the project was managed by the Pokemon company, which in turn, has Japanese management. Either way, I still consider it an overgeneralization to say that because SoftBank are Japanese they cant keep up with technology.
Wow, just wow.
rewow!
At this level money no issue: Money will ‘geyser’ from surprising places. [Geo]Politics [most probably ‘Brexit’ triggered] use to be ‘The Reason’ Up Here.
They’re trying to reserve their own coach in the “Internet of Things” train(wreck?), me thinks.
This is a “proxy” World Economy
Tears at bedtime for someone, methinks. Not that it’ll be the bankers who lent the monies to a company more likely to go bankrupt then survive.
Just too much funny money sloshing around with only low or negative interest rates for returns. Some sort of a bankers version of musical chairs with music just about to end and no chairs left.
Unless if you really know the strategy, vision or product roadmaps or whatever of Softbank, the comment from you is just a smoking ruin.
Softbank is also a manufacturer of Smartphones, so acquiring a chip designer must be a good investment for them. Softbank’s smartphone is cool, one of their smartphones I saw is 3D capable without using a glass.
Edited 2016-07-20 00:34 UTC
Worrying that they need a long-term loan from Mizuho Bank to fund this acquisition.
After Brexit I started wondering what’s part of the solid foundation of UK (or european in general) based tech industry (as a counterweight for the financial companies) and Arm came out as one of the bright spots.
And now this…
They will still pay UK tax for the time being. But don’t expect it will be long before the HQ moves to the mainland or even to Asia where the chips are actually fabricated.
ARM Holdings being such a IT Titan this intention has the strongest political and strategical variables. UK would do well if clearing the forward panorama.
[Should I say England?]
Doesn’t England realize that Brexit realizing trashes geopolitical status?
So bye, bye, Miss Raspberry Pi…