Arm Files to Go Public on NASDAQ
- Paul Thurrott
- Aug 21, 2023
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Chipmaker Arm filed an initial public offering (IPO) with NASDAQ today with hopes to be valued between $60 billion and $70 billion. It’s widely expected to be the biggest IPO of 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,” the company announced. “Arm has applied to list the ADSs on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ‘ARM’.”
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According to its filing with the SEC, Arm’s designs are used in the chipsets that power “greater than 99 percent of the world’s smartphones,” as well as “more than 250 billion chips, cumulatively, powering everything from the tiniest of sensors to the most powerful supercomputers.” The firm estimates that approximately 70 percent of the world’s population uses Arm-based products. Over 30 billion Arm-based chips shipped in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2023 alone, it reported, representing an approximately 70 percent increase since the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2016. Arm estimates that its total addressable market (TAM) will grow 6.8 percent each year and reach approximately $246.6 billion by the end of calendar 2025.
Arm also told the SEC that it earned a net income of $524 million on revenues of $2.68 billion in its most recent fiscal year; those figures represent drops of 4.8 percent and 1 percent year-over-year (YOY), respectively. But Arm expects a strong future thanks to AI and a rebound in mobile chipset sales.
Arm is currently owned by Softbank, which acquired it in 2016 for $32 billion and then unsuccessfully tried to sell the business to NVIDIA in 2020 for $40 billion: that deal was abandoned due to “regulatory difficulties.” Arm will be considered a “controlled company” by Nasdaq, meaning that while Softbank will sell some unknown part of the company, it will retain voting control.