According to Reuters news on February 7, SoftBank's deal with well-known chip manufacturer Nvidia on the sale of Arm has failed. In addition, due to the failure of this transaction, SoftBank has begun to plan Arm's initial public offering.
In September 2020, Nvidia and SoftBank issued a statement announcing that Nvidia would acquire Arm for $40 billion. Due to the unprecedented size of the transaction, the acquisition was once highly anticipated.
If the acquisition is approved, Nvidia will take control of Arm. This will allow Nvidia to be authorized by the Arm architecture to fulfill its ambitious vision of merging its own leading computing platform with Arm's ecosystem.
But thanks to resistance from all sides, the acquisition has now broken down.
On the one hand, the regulatory authorities of many countries are very sensitive to this acquisition, which has formed resistance to Nvidia's acquisition. In December 2021, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued Nvidia to terminate the deal. The committee noted that if Nvidia's acquisition of Arm is successful, it will hit competition in emerging markets such as self-driving car chips and new categories of network chips. At the same time, due to concerns about the market monopoly, price increase, innovation stagnation and other issues that may occur after NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm, the British Security Agency and EU regulators have also been paying close attention to this transaction.
In a January speech, an Nvidia spokesperson responded that while the future prospects of the deal are highly disputed, Nvidia insists that the acquisition is conducive to Arm's future development and innovation, as well as healthy competition in the market.
On the other hand, the price of the merger case has also risen with the rise of Nvidia's stock price. Even though the price of Nvidia shares has fallen recently, the deal price of the acquisition has finally locked in $80 billion, which is twice as high as when SoftBank and Nvidia disclosed the deal. However, it is still unclear whether Nvidia will be able to complete its vision in related areas after the acquisition of Arm, which has led to resistance from investors in the process of the acquisition.
Analysts pointed out that as the world's second largest chip manufacturer, Arm's technology does not have an unattainable technical barrier for NVIDIA. Nvidia's original intention in disclosing the acquisition may be to repeat the financial game when SoftBank acquired Arm, and earn more capital from the financial markets than it did to buy Arm.
Judging from the results, after disclosing the acquisition information of Arm, NVIDIA's stock price once soared. From Nvidia's point of view, the process of this transaction may be predictable, but the transaction information itself, for Nvidia, is already a victory in the financial markets. Leifeng networkLeifeng networkLeifeng network