Japanese Conglomerate SoftBank  takes full control of Arm, a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England whose primary business is the design of ARM processors which feature in the latest cutting-edge technology smartphones including Apple, Samsung with secure architecture built for performance and power efficiency. Soft bank acquired a 25 per cent of Arm which it did not already own from the Vision Fund the $100bn Saudi-backed vehicle managed by SoftBank. Arm is at a $64bn valuation. SoftBank valued the Vision Fund’s 25 per cent stake at about $16bn, roughly double the price that the fund paid when it  took the stake in 2017.

SoftBank led by Masayoshi Son,  bought arm for 432bn in 2016 and is planning to list the company in the New York. The internal transaction provides a guaranteed payday for the Vision Fund’s investors, including Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth funds, which invested alongside SoftBank to create the first of its ambitious tech funds in 2017.

This win comes after a series of disappointments including bad debts on companies such as WeWork and FTX.

SoftBank is hoping it can convince public market investors who have been starved of big new tech listings for 18 months, to pay more for a company whose intellectual property lies at the heart of the modern Smartphones, and looks for growth in the automotive, data centre and artificial Intelligence sectors. 

Only 10 per cent of the company’s shares will be available for purchase. In 2020, Softbank announced its intent to offload Arm to Nvidia in deal initially valued at 440billion, but the M&A bid collapsed in early 2022 after Nv failed to garner nearly all the necessary regulatory approval to move forward which cost the GPU vendor $1.25billion in costs.