Image: © Gorodenkoff/Stock.adobe.com
Arm has raised nearly $5bn in its IPO, which appears to be the biggest in scale since Rivian went public in 2021.
Arm has launched its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO), with a share price of $51, giving the company a reported valuation of more than $54bn.
The company said it will start trading today under the symbol ‘ARM’ and is listing at least 95.5m American depository shares on Nasdaq. Based on these figures, the IPO has raised roughly $4.87bn for SoftBank Group, the multinational investment holding company that owns Arm.
The IPO is reportedly the biggest for 2023 and the biggest in scale in the US since EV automaker Rivian went public in the second half of 2021 at a whopping $70bn. The $51 share price is also at the top of the range that had been indicated to investors, BBC reports.
The valuation may be slightly lower than SoftBank expected however. Last month, an internal transaction between the Japanese-headquartered company and Vision Fund – an investment vehicle managed by SoftBank – valued Arm at $64bn.
This transaction was conducted to buy the 25pc stake in Arm SoftBank did not already own, Reuters reports.
While the IPO has valued Arm at a lower value than this, it is still higher than its planned $40bn deal to sell the chip designer to Nvidia. This deal collapsed in February 2022 due to mounting regulatory pressure.
Concerns were raised by the UK’s competition watchdog and then from the EU, before the US Federal Trade Commission said it would sue Nvidia to block the deal.
Arm is one of the world’s biggest chip designers, especially in the ARM-based chips (or CPUs) space for smartphones. The company has made some highly successful deals this year outside of its IPO.
Earlier this month, Arm said it had entered a long-term agreement with Apple that “extends beyond 2040”, to give the iPhone maker continued access to its chip architecture.
In April, Intel entered a multi-year agreement with the UK chip designer to bring new designs into Intel foundries. The deal means chip designers will be able to create chips that use Arm cores and combine it with the benefits of Intel’s foundries.
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