Arm Announces Public Filing of Registration Statement for Proposed Initial Public Offering.
Cambridge, UK, August 21, 2023 – Arm Holdings Limited (“Arm”) today announced that it has publicly filed a registration statement on Form F-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) relating to the proposed initial public offering of American depositary shares (“ADS”) representing its ordinary shares. Arm has applied to list the ADSs on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ARM”. The number of ADSs to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have yet to be determined.
Raine Securities LLC is acting as financial advisor in connection with the proposed offering. Barclays, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, J.P. Morgan, and Mizuho are acting as joint book-running managers for the proposed offering.
Market observers anticipate that the US offering of SoftBank Group’s UK-based chip design business Arm will be one of the biggest tech IPOs ever.
The long-awaited measure comes after SoftBank paid $16 billion to buy the remaining 25% of Arm that it does not already directly own from the Japanese company’s Vision Fund 1, valuing the chip division at more than $64 billion.
Bloomberg estimated the total value of SoftBank’s IPO at between $60 billion and $70 billion, while SoftBank made no predictions about the expected share price in its IPO filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Since SoftBank decided to list fewer shares after purchasing the Vision Fund investment, the objective may be lower than what Bloomberg claimed Arm was looking to raise in the range of $8 to $10 billion.
As the creator of the business site Radio Free Mobile put it, “Arm needs to be seen to be like Nvidia and as an AI company” in order to reach the $64 billion valuation.
Windsor emphasized that “the AI story is so important to getting this IPO at the desired valuation” and that this is the reason SoftBank has sought out anchor investors from the tech sector.
Arm’s first quarter revenue, which ended on June 30, decreased 10.8% to $641 million.
After a deal to sell the company to Nvidia collapsed in early 2022, talk about listing Arm began.
SoftBank acquired Arm in 2016 for $32 billion.