Arm Files For IPO On Nasdaq

SoftBank's Arm has filed for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker symbol "ARM." The filing comes five months after the U.K.-based chipmaker announced it had filed confidential, preliminary IPO paperwork with U.S. regulators. TechCrunch reports: The outfit didn't provide a projected share price in its F-1 paperwork, but SoftBank recently bought the 24.99% stake in Arm that it didn't own outright from its Vision Fund unit, reportedly at a valuation of more than $64 billion. That's twice the $32 billion SoftBank paid for Arm seven years ago. (The Vision Fund has outside limited partners, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi; SoftBank sold that stake in Arm to the Vision Fund in 2017 for $8 billion.) Arm has long developed and licensed what it describes as high-performance, low-cost, and energy-efficient central processing unit (CPU) products and related technology, on which many of the world's leading semiconductor companies and OEMs rely to develop their products. Among customers of the roughly 6,000-person company are Apple, Alphabet, Advanced Micro Devices, Qualcomm, and Mercedes-Benz. Analysts expect Arm's IPO to be the biggest of 2023, though not everyone agrees that the company is worth what SoftBank thinks it is worth. Late last month, Bernstein analysts assessed Arm's fair-market value to be about $40 billion based on its preliminary analysis of the limited financial information that was available at the time. It isn't clear as of this writing whether Bernstein will revise that estimate based on the financial formation provided in Arm's F-1, including reported net income of $524 million on $2.68 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2023, which ended in March, which is almost exactly what it saw in 2022 sales ($2.7 billion).

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