Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering • Hacker News Board

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#221

Post by spiralpolitik » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 3:30 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #14

Thev00d00 wrote: post #5

Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US, I do understand they just want access to the most capital, but I find a shame LSE is not competitive for this kind of thing.

> Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US I wonder to what extent the overarching business culture of the UK (which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession) might have anything to do with it. (...speaking as a former UK eng myself)

The fact that the UK government allowed ARM to be sold to Softbank in the first place speaks volumes for how much the UK government values engineering.

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#222

Post by DrScientist » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

cowsandmilk wrote: post #103

DrScientist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely there is just more capital available in the US markets - the Arm listing won't be small. A lot of US funds have restrictions as to how much they can invest outside the US.

> A lot of US funds have restrictions as to how much they can invest outside the US. I'm not sure that's relevant. ARM is listing American Depository Shares, so this is still usually viewed as an international investment.

Are you sure - I always thought the whole point of ADRs was to make foreign company shares available on the American markets?

In fact the SEC says

'ADRs allow U.S. investors to invest in non-U.S.companies '

https://www.sec.gov/investor/alerts/adr-bulletin.pdf

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#223

Post by BooneJS » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

The world is so dependent upon ARM’s designs, yet their revenue is relatively small. Public companies are expected to grow year after year after year. It will be interesting to see how they do that without becoming a competitor to their customers. I wish them good luck!

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#224

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #219

pjc50 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no upper-class conspiracy holding people back, there just isn't much money. I think the argument is that there _is_ plenty of money, it's just parked safely and quietly in property rather than investing in production or R&D. And not a "conspiracy" as much as the blank look the property investor class give you when you can't promise risk free leveraged 7% forever.

I don't see how that is anyone holding anyone back? Why would you want to take funding from someone expecting no stress or hassle?

> Why would you want to take funding from someone expecting no stress or hassle?

The important word here is "money". There isn't a surfeit of money available from more suitable investors.

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#225

Post by fidotron » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 3:32 PM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #217

bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and Microsoft didn’t subsequently try to eat their piece of the pie? That second part wasn't in the original claim, though. The parent comment is right. Sure, 21st century Microsoft has come for the utilities market, for the Lotus-to-Evernote market, etc., etc., but an entire software industry really did spring up in the eighties through to the early 2000s filling gaps in Microsoft software.

Oracle, SAP, Adobe, VMware, Intuit, AutoDesk, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, just to list a few still surviving companies. Microsoft absolutely expands into areas it considers strategic profit or capability centers. E.g. office productivity, web browser, database, gaming, etc. But they, and especially early/smaller Microsoft (90s-00s), left a ton of money on the table for the good of the platform.…

> Oracle, SAP, Adobe, VMware, Intuit, AutoDesk, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Electronic Arts

SQL Server, Dynamics, TrueType/Silverlight, Hyper-V, Microsoft Money, Softimage was owned by MS, Activision are in the process of being bought by MS, Epic and EA both compete with MS.

In the case of the above Microsoft has tried to compete with, kill, or acquire all of them. That's using others to do the hard work of market discovery.

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#226

Post by DrScientist » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

jacooper wrote: post #74

DrScientist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely there is just more capital available in the US markets - the Arm listing won't be small. A lot of US funds have restrictions as to how much they can invest outside the US.

Why?

Not protected by US regulation and law.

So if you are a US pension fund that has all it's funds in Nigeria ( to pick an example ) - can it be said to be safe under US law?

Ironically the inverse problem EU countries have with US tech firms holding their citizens data - however it that case the response is generally 'la la la'.

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#227

Post by ac29 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:06 PM UTC

ricardobayes wrote: post #22

Thev00d00 wrote: post #5

Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US, I do understand they just want access to the most capital, but I find a shame LSE is not competitive for this kind of thing.

The business enviroment is a lot better in the US, a friend just started a company there, got an unsecured 80k line of credit at 1.5% on a fresh LLC. This kind of thing doesn't exist in the UK. I know people who couldn't even get a 5k overdraft after 2 years in business (and profitable).

> in the US, a friend just started a company there, got an unsecured 80k line of credit at 1.5% on a fresh LLC

This almost certainly required a personal guarantee (the friend would have to promise to repay the loan in the case the LLC could not).

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#228

Post by ac29 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #55

moconnor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "risks" section is pretty interesting, e.g.: "Arm China is 25% of our revenue, but we have no control over them, they have failed to pay us in the past resulting in us taking on additional costs to recover the money, also we have no way of knowing what they actually owe us and other than what they say, which has already been a problem"

The "ARM China going rogue" story is so weird. Although supposedly Softbank restored control last year? [1] So I don't know where things stand at the moment. https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/In-Depth-How-SoftBa...

>Although supposedly Softbank restored control last year?

Nope, the F-1 addresses this: "Neither we [Arm] nor SoftBank Group control the operations of Arm China, which operates independently of us. "

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#229

Post by t43562 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

spiralpolitik wrote: post #221

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US I wonder to what extent the overarching business culture of the UK (which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession) might have anything to do with it. (...speaking as a former UK eng myself)

The fact that the UK government allowed ARM to be sold to Softbank in the first place speaks volumes for how much the UK government values engineering.

The fact that they allowed Imagination Technologies to be sold to a Chinese company in this age of GPU powered AI is ......... even worse of an example

Re: Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering

#230

Post by RetroTechie » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #169

wslh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V is in the prospectus as a risk. Good for RISC-V!

>> RISC-V is in the prospectus as a risk. One option is to embrace it as an opportunity. ARM designs some pretty good CPU cores, so imagine they offered good RISC-V cores as well. RISC-V can be free, but a lot of companies still license core designs.

There's another option:

For a SoC (or bigger uC) include both ARM & RISC-V cores. They can work side by side, be used as development platform for either, share memory or peripherals included in the SoC (or perhaps share different but overlapping subsets of those resources). Or a Big.Little style setup where the "Big" and "Little" are different ISA.

Where utilising chip resources 100% is not too important (like, in most applications), designers could simply work with the ISA cores they're comfortable with. Switch use to the other cores, use the same peripherals.

Would this be difficult to work with? Unlikely. Software support for such setups exists, suitable defaults / boot settings & go.

At the very least this would get ARM foot in the door if it turns out RISC-V eating ARMs market share (which is already happening, be it limited scale so far). Or collect the 'ARM tax' for SoCs whose designers wanted RISC-V but don't mind including ARM as well.