Arm is looking like a ripe takeover target. South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix is weighing up whether to form a consortium of investors to acquire the British company.
According to Yonhap news agency (via Yahoo Finance) Park Jung-ho, vice chairman and CEO of SK Hynix is quoted as saying: “We are reviewing possibly forming a consortium, together with strategic partners, to jointly acquire it,” He followed up by saying “I don’t believe Arm is a company that could be bought by one company.” The comments came following the company’s annual general shareholders meeting.
The news follows Nvidia’s earlier failed bid to buy Arm after the US based company came up against major regulatory hurdles. The US Federal Trade Commission, UK Competition and Markets Authority, the European Commission and Chinese antitrust authority all raised concerns over the takeover. That led to Nvidia writing off $1.36 billion as a result of the failed bid.
As a South Korean company, it remains to be seen how global regulators will view a potential bid. If a deal does end up happening, it won’t be finalized any time soon.
Current Arm owner SoftBank is preparing to list Arm on the Nasdaq exchange. Arm has become one of the leaders in the world semiconductor ecosystem. Chips based on Arm intellectual property are sold by many of the world’s largest tech companies. Not just the Apple’s and Samsung’s of the world, but across industries as diverse as cars to supercomputers to automation.
Some analysts and Arm licensees themselves see Arm based architectures dethroning x86 as the dominant PC architecture. Qualcomm certainly seems to think so. Qualcomm, known for its Snapdragon SoC’s, claims that the company is “very well positioned to be the preferred platform for PCs, in the inevitable transition to Arm.”