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14 Sep - Commercial Awareness - Tech

FT: https://www.ft.com/content/651d4970-ef7b-46a0-a68f-c7b4b0ca888f

Topic: The biggest IPO in two years - Arm’s First Day on the NASDAQ exceeded expected share price by 25%


Arm’s first day on the NASDAQ closed at $65 billion, which raised $5 billion for SoftBank and became the largest US listing in two years.


Arm’s background

Arm is a chip-designing company

Arm was owned by SoftBank, one of the biggest venture capital funds that famously funded Alibaba, FTX, and WeWork.

It was purchased by Softbank back in 2016 at $32 billion.

An interesting side note: in 2020, NVIDIA negotiated with Softbank about acquiring Arm, but the sale eventually collapsed in 2022 due to competition issues.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/08/nvidia-takeover-arm-collapses-softbank


The IPO

Prior to the sale, Softbank bought 25% of shares that it originally did not own from Vision Fund.

The shares were valued at $26 billion and sold for $16 billion.

Apple, Google, Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung and more, owned about $735 million of shares together

Companies that invest in Arm see a rise in shares: TSMC shares increased by 1.5%

Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JPM and 25 other banks are involved in the sale 


Insights

The staggering number signifies and boosts confidence in the tech sector, venture capital, and IPO market. The VC fund hasn’t been performing well in recent years due to the collapse of FTX following the founder’s indictment of fraud in 2022 and the overexpansion of WeWork. Hence, Arm’s IPO served as a boost to the VC space.

There are two notable IPOs coming up: Instacart, a grocery delivery app and Klaviyo, a marketing software group.


Further research

The IPO is a wide topic because Arm is essentially semiconductors (the hardware) and intellectual property (the software). There are intense geopolitical tensions between US-China swirling around the semiconductor industry, so it is an extremely deep topic that I’ll be exploring further.


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