From Bloomberg, January 11:
These
days ARM Holdings Plc is expanding at such speed co-founder Mike Muller
has to make a reservation before he can use his own office.
“This
has become a meeting room so I have to book it when I’m here because
we’ve run out of space,” said the company’s chief technology officer in
an interview at ARM’s Cambridge, U.K., headquarters.
ARM
has added about 2,000 employees bringing its headcount to just shy of
6,000 at the urging of Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., which bought the
company in 2016. This has cramped its existing facility, where employees
are spread out among six low-slung office buildings.
ARM
will soon move to a new 48-million pound ($61 million) building on the
Cambridge campus -- featuring a vast 180-meter long atrium bookended by
“floating” staircases, and wired with more than 1,000 kilometers of
ethernet cabling. While begun before the SoftBank acquisition, it’s a
headquarters that befits ARM’s newfound swagger and ambition.
“It’s quietly understated," Muller says with typical British irony, before adding, "It’s nice, it’s big."
Founded
in 1990, ARM quietly grew into the U.K.’s largest listed company before
SoftBank’s $32 billion takeover. It designs chips that are licensed to
the world’s largest technology companies. As a result, just about every
smartphone, mobile phone, and tablet runs on an ARM chip.
Now
under SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son, the English
executives who run ARM are having to step out into the spotlight, due to
Son’s ambitions for the company. Son presses ARM executives in meetings
to move quickly through details of current operations and skip to
long-range plans. He insists that ARM submit monthly updates to its
10-year business plan to keep it focused on the future.
ARM
Chief Executive Officer Simon Segars said it means his job is to invest
‘like crazy’ as the company attempts to break into high-end computing
and become central to self-driving car technology. Such efforts will
have to start to pay off before spending is scaled back to prepare the
company to go public again in about five years, as Son has indicated.
ARM’s
new owner has also brought in a different audience. When Segars
recently showed Son a new Lenovo Group Ltd. laptop built on a chip that
uses ARM technology, he was asked to hang around and do a demonstration
later that day for Bill Gates during a meeting with Microsoft Corp.’s
founder.While Segars and his team are in the dream scenario for
technology executives: invest for growth and worry about profitability
later, the exchange is taking them out of their comfort zone. ARM’s
technology is pervasive in semiconductors. Son wants ARM to move into
software and services.
When
Son first opened takeover talks with ARM, he became fascinated with a
“science project,” according to Segars. One of the reasons Son bought
ARM is his belief that the chipmaker, with designs that dominate the
smartphone market, could achieve similar market sway in the chips that
will power the internet of things -- industry jargon to describe the
connection of everything from refrigerators to factory equipment to the
internet.
That
connected future doesn’t seem to be dawning as quickly as Son and many
other futurists hoped. And one reason is because all those connected
devices present a huge management hassle -- they must be made secure,
have their software updated and stay connected. Doing this is
technically complicated, and potentially expensive.
Another
problem is that ARM didn’t have much expertise in services for the
internet of things. It had always been two steps removed from the actual
end users of the devices that incorporated chips made with its designs.
So
now, with Son’s encouragement, ARM has begun bulking up its IoT
services division. In August, the company spent $600 million for
U.S.-based data analytics startup Treasure Data Inc. -- its largest deal
in 14 years. In June, the target was Stream Technologies, a
Glasgow-based company that improves connectivity for internet of things
devices....
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