Comment: IoT made ARM takeover inevitable

Richard Wilson, Electronics Weekly
July 18, 2016

The proposed $32bn takeover of ARM by Japanese firm SoftBank has caught the semiconductor market by surprise.

Most observers believe that the processor IP which is the main ARM business was so important to so many chip makers that ARM’s independence was too strategically important to the market to be broken.

As a result it was thought that its artificially high share price would not attract a buyer. SoftBank has made nonsense of this.

It seems to see a business case for paying $32b for ARM which has a business driven by markets as diverse as mobile comms, automotive, data servers and the internet of things.

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