SoftBank and Arm Holdings chairman Masayoshi Son will visit South Korea in October for the first time in three years to discuss a potential strategic partnership between Arm and Samsung, SoftBank said.
“I’m looking forward to the trip,” Son said through a SoftBank spokesperson, according to sources. bloomberg. “I would like to discuss a strategic alliance between Samsung and Arm.”
Neither SoftBank’s president nor the company’s representatives provided further details, but mention of the strategic nature of the meeting and the fact that the holding company’s president is traveling on his own suggests that Masayoshi Son is taking Arm to Samsung. The rumors were further fueled by Samsung Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee, who confirmed the meeting.
“When Chairman Son comes to Seoul next month, he will make some kind of proposal about Arm.” Korea Economic Daily.
A planned sale of Arm to Nvidia earlier this year fell apart after the uproar over Arm customers such as Qualcomm and a lawsuit against the merger by the US Federal Trade Commission.After the deal fell apart, SoftBank focused on Arm’s initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange in 2023, chasing a valuation of at least $60 billion, but Arm amid a slump in semiconductor stocks. Based on had plans to continue to manage the Limited’s shares Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index — A modified market cap-weighted index composed of semiconductor companies.
The SOX index is still at its lowest level in almost 12 months, and with processor and memory sales down significantly more than expected just a few months ago, a quick recovery is unlikely. As a result, SoftBank probably has reasonable doubts about whether it can ask Arm Limited for his $60 billion valuation in an early 2023 IPO. In this scenario, selling Arm (or at least parts of it) to Samsung (or a conglomerate of companies led by the South Korean giant) might make more economic sense for SoftBank. In fact, the Japanese company could even use its negotiations with Samsung to increase the value of the Arm in the eyes of other buyers.
Arm is strategically important to Samsung. The company uses Arm-designed CPU architectures and cores in its system-on-his chips for smartphones, advanced consumer electronics, PCs, and many other products. In fact, even Samsung’s SSD controller uses Arm Cortex-R processor cores and the importance of these cores in the storage market, one of Samsung’s key businesses, is that storage gains computing power It will only grow in the coming years as it does.
Acquiring Arm has made Samsung an overnight CPU and GPU powerhouse and could be a salvation for a company that has consistently failed to build competitive Arm-based CPU cores. However, there can be no assurance that such transactions will be approved by regulatory authorities or will not be opposed by Arm’s customers or by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. On the other hand, it might make sense for Samsung to buy a piece of Arm to keep competitors from dominating his IP developers.
