Weeks after its 440 billion acquisition deal with Nvidia fell through, British chipmaker Arm is planning to reduce its workforce by 15 percent, the equivalent of about 1,000 jobs. The company’s staff, about half of them people from the UK, run into a total of about 6,400.
Speaking on the situation on Tuesday, a spokesperson from the company said that “Like any business, Arm is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline. Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce,” adding that “If the proposals go ahead, we anticipate that around 12-15% percent of people in Arm would be affected globally.”
The Arm-Nvidia deal has been on for quite a long time. The announcement to sell Arm for $40 billion to Nvidia came in September 2020 and since then, the deal has been subject to regulatory scrutiny from regulators in the UK, the US, Europe and China, until it eventually fell through.
The Cambridge, England-headquartered technology company was acquired by Japanese’s SoftBank back in 2016 for $32 billion. The company licenses its technology to companies around the globe, and Nvidia could have stopped these companies from using Arm’s designs and technology if the acquisition went through. According to analysts and critics, the damage could have been huge. Apart from barricading these companies from Arm, a handful of criticisms came that Nvidia would have cut down jobs at Arm even though Nvidia kept saying all they wanted to do was invest in Arm.
In February, SoftBank’s CEO mentioned that SoftBank was planning to take Arm public following the failure of the company’s acquisition by SoftBank. Although there are reasons to expect Arm’s debut on the New York stock exchange, there is pressure on SoftBank to dual-list the company.
Whatever the outcome, Arm has the potential to become a really big name in the UK tech space.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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