Author: Xinguang Dog
TYPESETTING: LEAHMA
Exhibit: SOlab
In-depth good text, 1333 words = 3 minutes of reading
On February 12, according to the latest news, ARM China laid off employees to cope with the challenging business prospects this year! About 100 employees were laid off, and the employees who were laid off were mainly engineers in the research and development department. According to one of the sources, Arm China had about 700 employees before the layoffs. The company did not lay off jobs last year, when parent company Arm Ltd. laid off jobs globally, affecting 15% of its workforce, most of whom were based in the UK and the US.
Arm Source: Baidu
The unique Arm company
Founded in 1990 in Cambridge, England, Arm does not manufacture chips, but focuses on developing low-power chip IP and licensing it to chip design companies. It has become the world's leading IP provider. More than 95% of smartphones and tablets worldwide use the ARM architecture. ARM has designed a large number of cost-effective, low-energy RISC processors, related technologies and software. Based on this business model, Arm's main revenue streams include IP licensing fees and chip royalties.
Arm Source: Baidu
Industry facts: The ARM architecture, formerly known as the Advanced RISC Machine (Advanced RISC Machine) earlier known as the Acorn RISC Machine, is a 32-bit reduced instruction set (RISC) processor architecture. There are also derivatives based on ARM design, with important products including Marvell's XScale architecture and Texas Instruments' OMAP series.
Texas Instruments Source: Baidu
Nearly 10 years of development history
* In 2021, Arm's revenue was US$2.7 billion (approximately RMB 18.4 billion), a year-on-year increase of 35%. Among them, the Arm China joint venture accounts for about 20% of the total revenue, or about $540 million. The entire Arm chip licensing business generated revenue of $1.13 billion, and shipments of chips based on the Arm architecture reached 29.2 billion.
In 2019, Arm accounted for 90% of the global mobile processor and IoT processor market.
* In 2016, Japan's SoftBank Group wholly acquired Arm for $32 billion. SoftBank believes that with this acquisition, ARM will make SoftBank the next leader in the big potential technology market, namely the Internet of Things. At present, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, Huawei and UNISOC are all using Arm-related technologies to develop chips, and downstream applications are mainly smartphones, but also include the Internet of Things, PCs and data centers.
* In 2014, the annual global shipment volume based on ARM technology was 12 billion, and 60 billion chips based on ARM technology since its inception. The technology is characterized by high performance, low cost and energy saving.
Arm chip diagram Source: Baidu
The origin of the ARM China
The predecessor of Arm China is Arm's subsidiary in China, which has a history of more than 20 years. The official website disclosed that Arm China's current office locations include Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu, with 900+ employees and 85%+ R&D personnel. From the operational point of view, ARM China is the agent of ARM in China, serving ARM's interests in China, in terms of positioning, ARM China is ARM's distributor in Chinese mainland, its main function is to sell various types of ARM IP to Chinese mainland customers.
Arm Technology Source: Baidu
The capital winter has long been precursed
Intel's situation may be even worse, its revenue fell 20% year-on-year in the third quarter of last year, net profit plummeted 85% year-on-year, Intel began large-scale layoffs, involving thousands of people, and Intel also announced that it will cut capital expenditures by up to $10 billion by the end of 2025.
In 2023, Micron will reduce the annual base salary of some executives and suspend bonuses for all executives, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra facing a 20 percent pay cut, executive vice president by 15 percent and senior vice president by 10 percent.
In fact, not only Micron Technology, Wall Street giants have opened multiple rounds of layoffs, including Google, Apple, Amazon, and even Microsoft, which is very stable, has also started global layoffs.
Intel Corporation Source: Baidu