I think in many ways Arm is (or should be) a sort of large 'Mittelstand' [1] business. Long term focus, independence, customer focus etc are key to the success of this type of business.
Trouble is, its success and its sector has given it a profile that attracts attention from the likes of Softbank who have other ideas. A company doesn't need to have a Nvidia like P/E ratio to be successful.
You may be right. In that case they should offer a dividend to attract the kind of investors who are not necessarily looking for big gains in the stock price, but want a nice stable return. ARM was a growth stock for decades, but that phase is over for them.
> A company doesn't need to have a Nvidia like P/E ratio to be successful.
Absolutely true. Sadly nowadays, especially in the US, and especially in tech, unless the company is growing like crazy or massive, it's considered as insignificant and dimissed.
> especially in the US, and especially in tech, unless the company is growing like crazy or massive, it's considered as insignificant and dimissed
Maybe in Silicon Valley, were decades of totem disdain for anything resembling a business education is starting to take its toll. For anyone with a financial background, slow-growing profitable companies are most American industry. If you want to grow slowly (or barely at all), and want investors who like that, offer a dividend and price at a reasonable P/E.
Dismissed by who? Dismissed by the media and public is one thing, but if you think investors are also dismissing them unfairly, that doesn't sound unfortunate at all. That sounds like an investment thesis.
Do people use P/E as a metric for company success? I find the Nvidia one of 223 or so just a gross perversion, no real success there. It’s more about how irrational the average investor is now and how top heavy the SP500 is.
I think it’s a reflection of earnings potential. If nvidia can average 50% Y/Y earnings growth for the next 5 years, and stock price remains flat, that 223 falls to 30.
It is a reflection of exactly that, but this completely dismissed all the risks:
- Maybe new ml-tech is invented that does not require as heavy equipment.
- Maybe AI does not grow as fast as expected.
- Maybe a competitor comes along and pricing comes under pressure.
- Maybe supply chain issues.
Nvidia is interesting on multiple fronts. For one, GPUs aren't just useful for ML. Secondly, ML isn't just LLMs. I also find their bet on USD to have been vindicated by other industry players, and their Omniverse/digital twin concepts are going to be important tools for media, robotics, research, among other things. I'm not so sure their P/E isn't absurd, because it probably is, but you're not betting on just one horse with their stock.
You can easily make maybes in the other direction too - maybe they maintain their absolute market dominace, like Intel for years and years. Maybe they come with a technology jump that will be hard to beat for a long time, like M1. We are probably in the early adopter stage of current AI too.
Predicting the future is hard. Stock prices are based on extrapolated current information and mostly hype.
Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US, I do understand they just want access to the most capital, but I find a shame LSE is not competitive for this kind of thing.
> Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US
I wonder to what extent the overarching business culture of the UK (which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession) might have anything to do with it.
> I wonder to what extent the overarching business culture of the UK (which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession) might have anything to do with it.
That's nothing to do with it - the company is only listing on NASDAQ - ARM has office all over the world but will still be based and managed in the UK along with most of its employees (engineers) like when it was owned by a Japanese company.
Listing on the tech heavy NASDAQ rather than the LSE gives the company more access to investors that are likely to buy shares: retail, commercial, and hundreds of index trackers and funds - increasing the share price.
Well, the fifth largest ETF in the US is the sharply named QQQ which exclusively follows the Nasdaq-100 index. Everything larger tracks a broader domestic index like the S&P 500.[0]
Listing on the LSE relegates you to "international" funds, which make up a third or less of most portfolios. These have historically lagged US fund performance, quite significantly in the last ten years.[1]
So if you are a US pension fund that has all it's funds in Nigeria ( to pick an example ) - can it be said to be safe under US law?
Ironically the inverse problem EU countries have with US tech firms holding their citizens data - however it that case the response is generally 'la la la'.
The UK has a long intellectual tradition which creates a steady stream of creative and capable engineers. Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk. As a consequence there is low appetite for risky new ventures and those that want to undertake them mostly migrate elsewhere. What's left is a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dianosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors and a tiny creative industry that clings on despite suffering through waves of either government neglect, or worse yet, government interest.
I don't know if I buy your point about inherited wealth but there is what I'd describe as a stifling culture of rentseeking that, if not actively encouraged is certainly tolerated and overlooked, at many levels of society, and across both businesses and public organisations. And once you become aware of it you start to realise how obnoxious and oppressive it is.
We certainly don't lack for talent, but we're very good at suppressing or wasting it.
From my continental Europe perspective I suspect that Americans will inevitably look at those inherited wealth structures through their assumptions of unbounded rent maximization, oblivious to a certain element of responsibility that will be far more present in Europeans, continental or not. "Only because you can squeeze out that penny doesn't necessarily mean that you should" is something that exists in most places that aren't the US. American wealth seems to have that siloed off into charity completely separate from how the money is made than others, "exploit hard/donate hard". I'm certainly not suggesting that everything is fine in the UK, but I do think that certain assumptions that are true in American will tint the picture quite considerably.
"there is a culture of rent seeking" must be the understatement of the year. What the UK understands as "entrepreneurship" is buying property to rent. This is everyone from your grandma to the shiniest MBAs.
Aye. Nothing against housing associations that provide much needed social housing but the vast majority of private landlords[0], including AirBnB owners, are absolute parasites that have an entirely corrosive effect on communities and society as a whole. Indolent freeloading bloodsuckers.
[0] I'm sure there are exceptions: in fact I know there are. There are always exceptions. 20-odd years ago for a while I shared a flat with a couple of guys where the private landlord deliberately charged far below market rent in order to be able to offer affordable accommodation to people who weren't well off. Good people, the family that owned that place.
No such point was made (regarding a royal family).
Incidentally, the Royal Family themselves privately own 1/250th of the UK's land, and it is mostly not particularly valuable. Only about £15bn.
As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?
The Duke of Westminster (not a member of the royal family) has a physically much smaller (private) estate that is worth more than half of the royal estate.
What the royal family own privately should not be confused with what the "Crown" owns. The Crown estate is basically owned and operated by the state.
> As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?
If anything, I feel like the speed (or how recently the land was acquired) is actually in the Emmersons favour here. A generation or two ago somebody got wildly successful, vs. land being inherited because your 30x great-grandfather was Henry VIII.
Yeah. Swings and roundabouts though; most of the truly long-held property of the royal family has become the Crown estate, and over time the family has had to make much more of its income from that wealth due to the contraction of the Civil List.
Charles himself will only have income from his estate (whereas his mother had income from the Civil List)
What I meant to say is that in the blink of an eye, realistically -- in a couple of generations -- you could and probably will have a situation where a single land-owning family in the USA could end up with a very similar proportion of a _vastly_ larger country.
It's probably in the nature of land-owning for this to happen: someone ends up with all of it, then can't maintain it, and it ends up being sold off or dispensed to the state, then sold off, reaccumulated, and the circle continues.
And I think it's a mistake to see the royal family's land ownership as a source of power and influence. Unfortunately we give them the power and influence for no really good reason; the land is a side thing.
"It's probably in the nature of land-owning for this to happen: someone ends up with all of it, then can't maintain it, and it ends up being sold off or dispensed to the state, then sold off, reaccumulated, and the circle continues."
Realistically, once someone owns everything, they'd never ever have to sell. Because they could just rent it out temporarily for the same price. Demand isn't that flexible and in absence of other sellers, where else would a would-be buyer take their money?
Canada has many similarities. The inherited wealth is essentially banks and oligarchs. You pretty much have to be risk free to get any funding. Lots of window dressing and marketing to make Canada look good. If it were not for US companies (Cisco, Google, etc) the Canadian tech salary would be closer to Europe. Once you start living here you realize the truth about how much they value tech, protectionism, the incompetence of the telecom sector, stodgy banking and finance, poor education, unaffordable housing, and declining access to health (Ontario and stories from the Maritimes since health is provincial - cannot speak of Alberta/BC/etc).
All subpar but the marketing and virtue signaling is great. A lot of 'make Canada look good' comes at the expense of Canadians.
Quebec has had a few wins over the years with massive indirect subsidies toward strategic industries, notably gaming and AI. Public money is spent to attract big players which hire a critical mass of talent which leads to more players moving in and eventually some private risk capital becoming available for startups pending to the needs of the big guys. Nothing comparable to the American VC system though.
I live in Quebec. It's all for show to prop Quebec up as a place to even do business in.
There's nothing in the tech space that is worth even looking at twice in this province that isn't headquartered elsewhere. Most larger companies open up here just to tap into the potential talent that don't want to leave their home province and a lot of companies aren't willing to put in the effort of dealing with Quebec being the exception to everything.
If you want to understand Quebec it really boils down to three points:
- Protect French language
- Protect culture
- Have more children. This achieves 1 & 2 in a cycle.
Things that are going well for the province, cheaper car insurance, cheaper housing, cheaper electricity, and subsidize daycare. Oh! This all ties back into our 3 rules.
All these advantages come at the cost of higher taxes, but that is apart of the strategy. Don't build wealth, but just provide enough for hope, dreams of having a family and rope as many into this to fulfil the 3 points.
> Quebec has had a few wins over the years with massive indirect subsidies toward strategic industries, notably gaming and AI
And aviation. The Bombardier C-Series is a very advanced plane, and the first modern plane developed outside of Boeing or Airbus (outside of the smaller regional Embraer). Sadly American protectionism was the final nail in the coffin for the programme, but Airbus is comitted to the Mirabel site and assembly line, so Quebec still is one of the top aviation hubs in the world.
> Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth
Curious to see you prove that beyond an imagined stereotype. It's not as though we are in the first generation of US entrepreneurship and there is not a huge quantity of US inherited wealth in those VC funds. The founders of Intel, Apple, Walmart, Standard Oil etc. have all passed on. And on the other side, it's not like there haven't been a dozen generations since Norman lords chopping up all the land wealth. I think only one British billionaire is an aristo, the rest are business folk.
People underestimate the effect of how wealth attracts wealth in terms of commercial hubs - money chases opportunity and opportunities chase money and they end up in the same place for all sorts of reasons. It's just a system effect rather than a consequence of higher virtues that some love grant themselves.
- Dyson: actually an innovator! Made many of the same criticisms of the UK lack of tech strategy. Promoted Brexit, which has made the situation worse by erecting barriers to a key UK market.
- Ratcliffe: owns INEOS: oil refineries. Old school engineering? Or just provision of capital?
- Hinduja: purchaser of Ashok Leyland, which became a huge success once unshackled from disastrous management of British Leyland. Counts as "engineering" but not "tech"?
- Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster: classic aristo landlord. Owns large areas of London.
- Platt: hedge funds.
""The reality is that there is no willingness within the Eurozone to share wealth," he said. "In the United States, if California is having a really difficult time, the rest of the United States will send money to California. This is not the case in Europe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Platt_(financier) , perhaps a surprising advocate of redistribution
- Coates: gambling. Counts as "tech startup" (bet365)
- Bamford: heir to JCB, the excavator company. "Engineering". Brexiter, as a result of being sued for antitrust by EU
- Branson: definitely self-made, across a large number of different companies. Space billionaire, closest figure to British Musk.
- Currie: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.
- Reece: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.
- Cadogan, 8th Earl Cadogan: aristo. Dead.
- Lewis: trader. Like Soros, profited from Black Wednesday. Under arrest in Manhattan.
- Reuben: metals. Seem to have made a killing from 90s Russia.
- Graff: diamonds. Looks like classic self-made from nothing story?
- Calder: Jive records.
- Morris: Home Bargains. Wildly successful discount shopkeeper.
(you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth)
Indeed. You can see in some of the comments here the American mentality simply could not have made ARM successful because they would have been too busy competing with their own customers. For ARM to take off and be trusted they had to knowingly leave valuable profit margins around for their customers to be able to take advantage of.
The defining question is if the world is better off by having people play that game or the one where everyone tries to takeover everything all the time.
Where are these third party developers that made decent money and Microsoft didn’t subsequently try to eat their piece of the pie?
It is a repeated pattern and people are not stupid. (See also the Sherlock phenomenon with Apple). Valve, for example, have to invest in proton as the ultimate back up plan. For me personally that has proven quite helpful, but your initial business has to be wildly successful for you to be able to play defensive moves like that.
This leads to a situation where mid sized companies are few in number and unstable.
> and Microsoft didn’t subsequently try to eat their piece of the pie?
That second part wasn't in the original claim, though. The parent comment is right. Sure, 21st century Microsoft has come for the utilities market, for the Lotus-to-Evernote market, etc., etc., but an entire software industry really did spring up in the eighties through to the early 2000s filling gaps in Microsoft software.
Oracle, SAP, Adobe, VMware, Intuit, AutoDesk, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, just to list a few still surviving companies.
Microsoft absolutely expands into areas it considers strategic profit or capability centers. E.g. office productivity, web browser, database, gaming, etc.
But they, and especially early/smaller Microsoft (90s-00s), left a ton of money on the table for the good of the platform. Because they realized they couldn't do it all and be best-of-everything.
The fact that Microsoft can deploy its level of resources (e.g. crush Lotus) when they decide to doesn't mean that they always decide to.
SQL Server, Dynamics, TrueType/Silverlight, Hyper-V, Microsoft Money, Softimage was owned by MS, Activision are in the process of being bought by MS, Epic and EA both compete with MS.
In the case of the above Microsoft has tried to compete with, kill, or acquire all of them. That's using others to do the hard work of market discovery.
Indeed, Microsoft has offerings in many of these categories, one reason I specifically mentioned databases.
And yet, these companies are all extremely large and healthy.
Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard is a great example, because it speaks to the modern competitive landscape.
Microsoft isn't "using others to do the hard work of market discovery." Activision Blizzard has a USD$72b market cap.
That's a hyperscaled conglomerate attempting to buy a still-huge company.
And if you want to suggest Microsoft's behavior is unique in that... I'd suggest we start with redressing the lax competitive laws that (a) make Microsoft feel it needs to do that to compete with its rivals & (b) allow Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard.
Those companies are only that big because of profit on non-Microsoft platforms, including these days the web and mobile. For example, Activision (founded to make Atari 2600 games) are being acquired because of their console and mobile properties - the value derived from the PC is there but relatively small and historic. The amounts Microsoft have burned trying to make money from gaming defy belief, instead they seem determined to destroy the viability of the market for everyone.
One reason I am pessimistic about Arm's future is they will struggle to balance raising money for future needed R&D without creating the appearance of being too lucrative a target for a nVidia or SoftBank wanting to play monopoly. That is going to push people to RISC-V. I hope they manage to do something, but they're in for a rough time.
If they collected much more profit from each device sale then they wouldn't have market-dominating IP. Because they'd have competitors who could undercut them.
As it is, a tiny firm of people make an extremely good living off a margin that nobody in the business can really quibble with, and it has without conflict sustained them to do greater and greater work that has changed the world.
You watch: ARM post-IPO will inevitably have to start squeezing more juice out of the market to give to greedier, more transactional, more activist shareholders, and this will fuck up the balance entirely.
An ARM IPO isn't really going to be good for anyone, I think.
I would be surprised if many Brits know of ARM as a British success story. Ditto for Raspberry Pi or Deepmind. These things are just not celebrated, it seems.
If you ask people in the street to name a famous living British technologist, they might come up with Tim Berners-Lee or James Dyson, but they are never going to name Sophie Wilson.
It is upsetting to me but you are right, they'd know Dyson. (I wish they would instead know the name Chris Duncan, the inventor of the Henry vacuum cleaner and while still a Brexiteer, a man who hasn't subsequently kicked dirt in the eye of the UK).
They wouldn't remember Tim Berners-Lee's actual name but they would be able to say, the web guy. (Which is probably better for him when he goes shopping).
But yes, few people who actually _build_ things, get to be famous public figures. Possibly due to being too busy to engage with the media nonsense or even worse social media nonsense.
Alas pjc50 specified living British technologists.
I mean, Britain has many great technologists if you're willing to count the likes of Arkwright (died 1792), Babbage (died 1871), Watt (died 1819), Faraday (died 1867), Randall (died 1984), Bell (died 1922), Harrison (died 1776), Logie Baird (died 1946), Stephenson (died 1848) etc
But some would say if a country's list of technology greats has so many dead people on it, perhaps that country's glory days are over.
£50 pound note, william churchill is the one on the £5 note.
This is burned into my brain. because I heard a joke when the redesign came out about him going from not being accepted by his country to not being accepted in Lidl. (£50 notes are often refused in the UK for fear of counterfeit.)
I cannot prove it, and this is entirely anecdotal, but my friends and I have observed it first-hand from VC dealings and friends in the right UK circles. Inherited generational wealth and class in my experience powers UK investment, particularly in the start-up scene, much more than in the USA. Of course, there are some exceptions I can think of in the UK but it is very much tied up with the class system there and understanding this makes life easier. The same situation affects other European countries to some degree, and many people I know have had to go to US VC firms to get funding. I have spent a lot of time working in all of these countries to some extent and the UK class system seems to be increasingly stifling. YMMV though.
Nah, the OP is talking bollocks. The angels I know are all middle/working-class entrepreneurs. There is no upper-class conspiracy holding people back, there just isn't much money. Non-Brits don't really understand that class is not money. Red trousers are closer to farmers than businessmen. If you are British and want to be a tech investor, you go to the US too.
> There is no upper-class conspiracy holding people back, there just isn't much money.
I think the argument is that there _is_ plenty of money, it's just parked safely and quietly in property rather than investing in production or R&D. And not a "conspiracy" as much as the blank look the property investor class give you when you can't promise risk free leveraged 7% forever.
Most folks I know and have read about didn't go to the loan shark or local mafia for 'money' even though that is even more readily accessible and with zero paperwork.
Thanks for the kind words. I actually agree a lot with what you say, and would just add my personal experiences, and be interested in learning more, but I don't think you established the tone for further conversation here.
Absolutely. As others have alluded to: angels abound, but look at the pedigree of the associates and partners at VC funds based in London and it all falls into place. I assume it’s because it’s a relatively easy job that you don’t need much talent for. Perfect for an intelligent but bored dauphin.
> a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dinosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors
Ah! Now I get it. That rhymes with companies like Shell and Unilever leaving the EU in favour of UK after brexit.
(Not that Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam or Paris are known to be heavy investors in tech innovation, btw.)
Well Shell (and BP) are really likely to get sweetheart deals on North Sea oil from Rishi Sunak which might have swayed them.
Now, I know what you're thinking, that that's just because both firms coincidentally signed multi-billion dollar deals coincidentally with Sunak's family business, Infosys, to coincidentally outsource all their IT jobs but I assure you that's a mere coincidence.... probably. :P
If you look past the tech bubble economies where the "new money" owners are, and into the world of physical assets, what you find is a constellation of families concentrating wealth, swirling around the central families of the 21st Century -- the Waltons, the Mars family, the Kochs, and so on down -- a power series of family wealth that has ordinary investors in the long tail.
The USA is easily distracted by the vibrancy of the market-driven tech economy, and hoodwinked into ignoring the astonishing growth of private equity controlled by inherited wealth.
The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment.
The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained.
Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything.
I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.
I'm not British, but it is my understanding that after WW1 and WW2 the money had just dried up when it came to capital-intensive projects. I've just finished reading a book [1] that explicitly mentions the lack of available money as a reason for the Brits having to give up their Sea Power status just after WW2.
This was certainly a real problem, as was the whole IMF rescue business in the 70s, but not across the whole postwar period. More could have been done with the oil wealth than turn it into a real estate boom, for example.
Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.
Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.
And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.
As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US.
Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor.
Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better).
But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.
The one case where your argument fails is very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US you will end up with worse care.
And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality of care within a reasonable time. But it's nothing close to how good it used to be so for the serious part of my care I went to the far better hospital in Brazil covered by my employer provided insurance.
I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride.
The US does provide better care right now if you are rich or privileged enough to have a job that is in demand. But a well funded NHS is a far better system if the political will to get back to that exists.
> I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride.
I am not sure that is the case? The country seems to have a weird obsession with the NHS and seems to downplay/overlook its problems. Frankly even before its recent woes, I found it pretty shit compared to socialized healthcare in France.
The current state of the NHS should prompt riots, yet everyone seems complacent in seeing their literal lifeline being destroyed by greedy, incompetent & senile oligarchs.
There's "catastrophic injury/health" insurance in the U.S. You just don't get it by default. I did a bit of research into the topic in the past and my takeaway is that if you buy the right insurance packages you get pretty much the same coverage in the U.S. that you'd get here (Germany) except you have the option not to do it. From what I gather it's also not that much more expensive, I'd argue the quality of care in the U.S. is probably better (it's pretty high in Germany but the U.S. is probably the #1 in the world on average) and the service quality for someone with this kind of insurance package is better for sure (longer waiting times in Germany for certain procedures/issues for example). All of this is assuming you're lucky enough to have a decent job/salary (which we are as tech people).
I guess it looks more grim for the "lower end of the spectrum" in the U.S.
Hot-take: It's an emotional defence mechanism: on-the-whole the UK and US are far too similar and integrated that it's natural for middle-class Brits to larely consider themselves peers, and not near-peers, of their US counterparts - so when you have that view of yourself and your place in the world but then look at the stark the income disparity, you're going to comfort yourself with all of the bad things about the US (and the US' bad things are legion) - and invoking the egalitarian NHS happens because the UK gets its impression of the US healthcare "system" (industry?) from things like Michael Moore's Sicko or Times columnists reporting on all the messed-up healthcare injustices that happen in the US - but there is a very real ignorance of what healthcare is like in the US when the system does actually work well for you.
And if it isn't NHS vs. "doesn't &everyone* get medical-bankruptcy?" then it'll be about guns, or the death penalty, or overt racism in the south, or corporate america's excesses, or US foreign-policy, and so on. Because those are the things that Channel 4 will report on - but you won't see or read stories that upset anyone's feelings on their place in the world: and it works on everyone: I've already mentioned Guardian-reading types, but also and especially the Brexit-types: who still desperately want to believe the British empire could be brought-back because the Daily Express told them so.
I agree you need to consider total compensation. It's still not even close though.
The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be.
The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.
And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
All US employers I've worked for included disability and long-term injury insurance as standard benefits, in addition to always offering the best-tier health-plans (from non-profit insurers too). Unemployment insurance is another (legally mandatory) benefit that outshines whatever I'd get in the UK because it isn't considered a public-benefit (i.e. it's not the state or Feds paying it ("welfare" as yanks call it), it's still a insurance pool model where the payouts are proportional to your salary and not some arbitrary income limit the DWP set for the year, nor is means-tested or requires me to use-up my savings first - so in WA ( https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit ) I'd be getting about $4k/mo for 6 months, for comparison I quickly ran the numbers on benefits-calculator.turn2us.org.uk (there's no official UK calculator, wat) just now and got... £300/mo - and that's only after I exhaust all my savings first. (To be fair, I could just purchase private unemployment insurance in the UK too, except I'd be paying for it myself out-of-pocket (though it might be a tax-deductible expense?) whereas in WA employers are required to pay into it at no cost to the employee, IIRC).
It eventually runs out. The US healthcare system can eventually bankrupt you no matter how careful you are, if your health problems are serious enough.
I don’t know about Facebook, but at other BigTechs we were offered very affordable short and long term disability plans. And if your income is low enough (e.g. laid off or fired), you qualify for ACA health plans with huge subsidies making it almost free.
That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.
Facebook very probably has a group long-term disability insurance policy which adequately its employees in that case. Google did when I worked there many years ago. Some supports might also come from Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and loans or withdrawals from retirement accounts that are far better funded at Facebook US than at Facebook UK.
It eventually runs out, yes, but the good long-term disability policies last until retirement age, when social security retirement benefits kick in. You may be confusing it with a short-term disability policy, which is more common, or with mediocre long-term policies.
Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits, not even those with career-ending disabilities. You’re underestimating the inequality of benefits within the US.
Not a permanent work stoppage example, but here is one relevant anecdote: I have personal knowledge of someone who got severely crippled by a freak accident that would have made most Americans go bankrupt and never be able to work again, including a need for repeated brain surgery. His FAANG employer benefits paid for what he needed, and although he was permanently wheelchair bound, he was eventually even able to return to work part-time (of course not initially) because of how good their benefits are.
I don’t have statistical data, but I have worked at one of those companies in the past and am familiar with the caliber of compensation and benefits, so I’m generalizing from firsthand knowledge.
Honestly, even the comp allows building savings so rapidly that it helps a lot even before considering the benefits - and one of the benefits, at least at Google, was by far the best 401(k) plan I’ve ever heard of, including allowing less common options in the law which most plans don’t want the administrative hassle of allowing, and lower expenses than retail investing. So personal wealth (and therefore defense against high medical bills) grows really fast at those companies, and then the benefits most allow the employees not to spend those savings on medical costs.
Dismiss my assertions if you like, since they indeed aren’t statistically proved. But I don’t think there’s likely to exist public statistical data either proving or disproving my claim, so assertions like mine are the best we have. Any private data that might exist with sufficiently tailored scope would be kept within the HR department of Facebook or Google, and I’ve never seen it.
I should also probably clarify that I’m talking about US technical or managerial/executive full-time employees and not, say, someone who works in a warehouse shipping Google Store phone purchases, or employees with a foreign comp and benefits package.
But once he/she has a family (or just a pregnant partner) he/she is really handcuffed to the job by that perk, no? The risk of losing that cover makes it very difficult to make sensible life choices.
Is your claim that a Facebook engineer would have trouble finding a different job with high compensation and great healthcare? That's a bold and hard to believe claim.
But answering you on the merits: it’s entirely possible, yes.
For example, what if sensible life choices include moving out of state to a place where there is less tech industry? Just changing jobs can interrupt healthcare and cause costs. And the process of switching providers is, in the experience of a friend with a family with complex healthcare needs, sometimes so kafkaesque it might not be worth the risk.
What if sensible life choices involve blowing the whistle or just being critical of the industry? Can you risk it?
What if sensible life choices mean wanting to substitute time so your partner can go back to work? Does their plan match yours for the benefits you’ve both come to rely on?
It’s not unusual at all for people in all sorts of situations and on all sorts of incomes to effectively end up tied to a job by the security of specific features of a workplace health plan.
Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument.
I do wonder if people in the particular FAANG bubbles are just too young and healthy to understand that healthcare plans aren’t just a tradeable, interchangeable perk: once you are really deeply using them, they can get a lot less interchangeable.
Sorry, but you gave no evidence that the average talented person would be handcuffed to a specific company as soon as they start a family. And you especially gave no evidence that they would "lose that cover". That was your original claim.
> This comes across as quite rude, TBH.
Sorry if you saw it as rude, but I was politely asking from my perspective. It's normal to ask folks for evidence backing up their claim when you don't find it believable. How could I have asked my question in a more polite way?
> Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument.
I did. And I failed to come up with an explanation based on my decades of work experience. Healthcare has never chained me to a job even when I had health problems. Pretty much every company offers a healthcare plan. The only thing that ever concerned me was becoming unemployed.
I have been buying health insurance that uses Blue Cross Blue Shield’s network in the US, and in 4 different states with 4 different health insurance companies on east and west coast it did not seem to make any difference.
I have bought them on healthcare.gov, and I have received them from employer, and it all seems to be interchangeable from my experience over the last 10+ years.
The tax differences aren't that big, and they come with other nationalized services in addition to healthcare. Per capita healthcare costs in countries with nationalized healthcare can be 50% less than in the US. So you're getting much better value for your money when you pay taxes for that healthcare.
They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able to start for about 6 months). If the US ever adopted a more lax immigration system in line with the UK, Canada, the EU etc I would expect US engineering salaries to drop.
> They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world.
That's accurate. But what surprises me is how much in demand software engineers are globally and how little they get paid in most countries. It doesn't make any sense to me that Dan Abramov could more than triple his salary at Facebook just by being employed by the US branch. The value he provides to the company would in no way change.
Compared to the US system of workers' visas, it's incredibly lax. Unless I'm misinformed. I haven't had to think about it much though, as I'm an Irish citizen and can come and go as I please.
As it's 2am here, I'll rattle off assorted bullet-points in no particular order:
* The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there.
* Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs.
* For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long.
* Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky.
* A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life.
* More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters.
* Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad.
* One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card.
* It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with.
* Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here.
All modern UK governments have been largely indifferent on protecting British industry, and when they do it normally blows up in their faces. It's now a case of 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.
I had forgotten about this, to be honest, but national security grounds is either what it says on its face or "what is the smallest amount of intervention we can do here to satisfy all those critics talking about something we don't understand".
Our Prime Minister thought getting the Royal Mint to produce NFTs was a good idea. In 2022.
I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented...
Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.
The fact that the UK government allowed ARM to be sold to Softbank in the first place speaks volumes for how much the UK government values engineering.
The fact that they allowed Imagination Technologies to be sold to a Chinese company in this age of GPU powered AI is ......... even worse of an example
It can't be - sentimentality rarely gets in a way of a business-deal this big. But it might explain why ARM themselves (whether employees or shareholders, regardless of country) might not put too much effort into staying in the UK, I mean.
Two reasons: NASDAQ values Tech higher than LSE and inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 will mean funds/indexes have to buy in which will boost the share price. This is the smart choice for Masayoshi Son to maximise ROI.
Masayoshi Son is desperately needing to make some smart choices after making some of the biggest investment blunders in history through the Vision Fund... I agree this one is the way to play it safe with what could be the best investment in his life.
The business enviroment is a lot better in the US, a friend just started a company there, got an unsecured 80k line of credit at 1.5% on a fresh LLC. This kind of thing doesn't exist in the UK. I know people who couldn't even get a 5k overdraft after 2 years in business (and profitable).
Sounds like English banking has not changed much from 20 years ago, when I needed to spend 3 months in the UK, had to have a uk bank account to rent a flat, but needed an English residence to open a bank account.
Consumer banking has radically changed. I can't comment on needing a residence to open a bank account to get a residence, because although I ran into the same issue when I first came here it's been a long time since that was a problem for me. In other aspect personal banking is much much easier. Many banks allow you to open accounts online, for example.
Yeah, and to prove your English residence you have to provide a paper bill from a utility company (water or electricity) with your name and address on it. Which adds another 3 month as those utility bills are on a quarterly basis. Crazy stuff...
In terms of personal banking it's definitely gotten easier for new comers with the likes of Monzo and Revolut - I had no problem opening account on arrival. From what I've heard the high street banks have improved a bit in this regard too, probably in response to the challenger banks taking market share.
Finding a place to rent on the other hand is still difficult, particularly without a history of renting in the UK
And if it is a high demand area you need to look more spanky than all the other applicants: great jobs, rental references, no kids/pets, older couple prefered of sharers. In London you also need to make an offer on the spot.
Sadly the UK has a long history of sending its own tech industry abroad...
It begun with the invention of the computer as we know it...
- Charles Babbage,"Father of the computer", British
- Alan Turing, "Father of modern computer science", British
Then there was Margret Thatcher who decided the internet was a fad and wasn't worth investing in internet infrastructure in the country.
Where did the multi billion (if not trillion by now) industry end up? Silicon Valley and elsewhere....
Thatcher was replaced by a guy called Blair who saw the internet as the future worth investing in. Sadly he found another cause to throw money at.
The mistake Thatcher made was to open up the telecoms market to competition at a time when the legacy provider (BT) were starting to build a high speed internet highway/backbone. In hindsight, this could indeed be considered an error but looking how BT have fared since, perhaps not?
We're now in the absurd situation where 4 out of 6 power generating companies are foreign owned and the Japanese own our chip manufacturer.
All because of her policies that originally envisioned that the share holding would be by the British public, not foreigners.
And the latest scandal is that our water companies are dumping ridiculous amounts of sewage into our waterways while giving out huge dividends. And there's nothing anyone seems to be able to do about it.
We've had a few Prime Ministers since Thatcher, was her reach so powerful that she could prevent them from doing anything about this?
I recall Blair saying he regretted not doing enough about energy security when he was in power, I don't recall him blaming Thatcher?
Brown expands nuclear ambitions (2008):
The prime minister said that with oil prices soaring, it was time to be "more ambitious" for nuclear plans...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7424158.stm
There has been a long history of failure, by both sides of the political spectrum.
Well, yes. Thatcher had a long tenure, a strong majority and enacted sweeping, long-lasting changes.
Blair was the only other recent politician with similar power. He was actually a fan of privatisation and deregulation (and still is, if you read recent interviews).
And recent governments don't even want to fix it, the status quo benefits their rich donors, even if it's massively hurting Britain's long-term prosperity. You've also got a significant section of the Tory party that still believe in the thoroughly discredited neoliberalism Thatcher followed, as seen by Liz Truss' disastrous tenure.
I'm not a Thatcher hater, but there were a lot of negatives as well as positives.
All because of her policies that originally envisioned that the share holding would be by the British public, not foreigners.
This is the most charitable interpretation of events (no sarcasm intended[1]), and one I would like to believe, but greed is very powerful and leads people to evil, so I can well imagine various lobbying groups would have seen the easy mid-term money to be made from such sales.
[1] "Never attribute to malice that which may be adequately be explained by incompetence."
True but the driver before the world wide web would have been cable TV over fibre to the home.
She decided it was better to open the market to foreign cable TV providers and so barred BT from selling TV access.
Without TV there was no driver for fibre investment.
Where BT would have had a requirement to provide universal access to fibre, as with phone provision, Telewest and NTL just did geograhically limited roll outs of legacy coax and the rest is history.
Fair enough, but I don’t see how this supports her thinking the internet was a fad not worth investing in.
Also it denies agency to those in power in the decades that followed. I mean did that decision bind the policymakers that followed when it became clear how important the internet really was?
Well you can't make all the right moves in history :) At least they got mercantilism right and built an effective navy to practically rule the world not so long ago.
I don't think it's about lack of capital but higher valuations. For reasons which don't seem to be well understood, investors on US markets seem to be willing to bid higher multiples than investors on UK and most other markets.
More liquidity. No stamp duty on share purchases. Prices denominated in the world's reverse currency. Access to the largest market institutional investors.
It's been a topic for quite a while that UK regulations mean pension funds don't invest as much in equities and as a result there's not a huge amount of liquidity available to dump into stocks on the London Stock Exchange. They are working on trying to fix this though (slowly).
The irony of course is that this has been caused by regulatory induced de-risking of employer pension funds after a lot of them went bankrupt and left the government on the hook via the PPf
Well Mrs May f'ked that one up.
It used to be on UK AIM (LSE) until she waved it through despite security interests and minor UK shareholders (i.e. me) not wanting to sell.
Cue BoJo later grovelling to ARM once they actually realised they'd sold off one of the biggest UK IT companies and tried to get them back.
Is there more global access to the US market? Does capital flow with less friction to it?
What about indexes? If they qualify for NASDAQ or some other major index, there's some "mandatory" investment that gets triggered by a bunch of funds that do index tracking.
I would presume where you choose to list is kind of a flag of convenience, like it is in maritime. It's probably not as irrelevant as to where things actually happen as flying the Liberian flag or incorporating in Delaware but I'd bet it's close.
> Is there more global access to the US market? Does capital flow with less friction to it?
Yes, and yes.
> What about indexes? If they qualify for NASDAQ or some other major index, there's some "mandatory" investment that gets triggered by a bunch of funds that do index tracking.
NASDAQ is an exchange, not an index.
The most prominent index on NASDAQ is the QQQ, the top 100 stocks,market cap weighted.
But this is the big boy playground, the smallest stocks in QQQ should have at least $400B marketcap. ARM by the most optimistic estimation should be 1/10th of that.
Arm would definitely qualify for the Nasdaq 100 index. I don’t know where you’re getting the $400B market cap minimum, but the current index includes Zoom (19.7B), Walgreens (23.3B) and eBay (22.8B), among many other companies well below $40B (let alone $400B) market cap.
To further explain, in most financial jargon, one often call an index by its (historically) most traded tracking fund. That is, the NASDAQ 100 is often called the QQQ, the S&P 500 is often called "spider" (SPDR), etc.
But you're 100% right, in a comment about vocabulary, jargon has no place.
What does it mean that Arm is headquartered in the UK, practically speaking? What kind of a change would need to happen for, say, the Austin office to become the headquarter?
If I remember one of the original conditions put on the acquisition of ARM by the UK gov was that HQ stays in the UK. So I doubt that will change. Can't say I'm familiar with the tangible benefits, but I assume is exposes ARM to UK law and regulation more than if the HQ was in another country. And retains some jobs in the UK.
There must be some benefit for governments to make such a request.
Most people who can afford it do. We still come out and cheer for the national religion once in a while though since we are told repeatedly it is the envy of the world.
No the British news accurately reports on how bad it has become after over a decade of politicians defunding it. It's sad. When I left London a decade ago I had no reason to ever use my private insurance. NHS was excellent. Now I still use NHS when I visit but it not to the very high standards it used to be. And I have to sometimes use my private insurance. Everyone knows this and talks about it. I don't expect this to continue though. Most people want to return to a well funded and more functional NHS.
I know this is probably not the cause, and maybe it's just me being a naive SJW, but in my view London's financial institutions lost 90% of their credibility capital recently not so much because of Brexit (which hit them too) but because of the whole LME Nickel trade rollbacks shenanigans. Yes I know LME != LSE, and I know it was a lose-lose situation, but they co-exist and as a person who is not into finance they share their credibility to an extent.
During the height of the covid tech bubble, Nvidia offered to buy ARM for $40b. Right now, Softbank wants a $60b - $70b valuation when many tech stocks have lost 90%+ and some large caps have lost 30% - 50%.
What justifies such crazy increase in value? Also, I believe Nvidia overpaid for the company regardless. Nvidia was willing to pay $40b because they want a world-class CPU design team to integrate their GeForce IP into SoCs and service chips.
But a standalone ARM is not very valuable. The reason is that ARM's business model (licensing core designs and ISA) makes peanuts compared to Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc. In addition, ARM's biggest customers are also their biggest competitors. For example, Apple competes with stock ARM designs with Apple Silicon. Qualcomm will be competing with ARM designs via Nuvia chips. Ampere Computing just designed a custom ARM core of their own.
When ARM only license the ISA (Apple Silicon, Nuvia, and Ampere One), they make peanuts. When they license ARM core designs, they make slightly more than peanuts.
It's generally not a good business to invest in. I find it hard to justify the $60b - $70b valuation. No doubt Softbank will try to sell ARM as an AI company. It's not.
>Arm reported $524 million in net income on $2.68 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2023, which ended in March
>i find the current valuation ludicrous, and it seems like it's pushed more by Softbank's Vision Fund than a firm grasp in reality.
Just for comparison, AMD, which is still quite small, gets about $2b - $4b annual net profit. Intel, before their recent disaster quarters, had as much as $24b in annual net profit.
$524m in net income is peanuts compared to the big boys. This is what I was saying in my original post. ARM is a more valuable company if they were acquired by Nvidia. As a standalone company, it's not that great. Again, a weird quirk of ARM is that their biggest customers are also their biggest competitors. This puts a cap on how much profit they can make. If ARM decides to raise licensing fees exponentially, which is likely not simple due to long-term contracts, then companies will seriously look to RISC-V.
Because ARM is the smallest fish in the pond, it can't pay for the best engineers. The best chip engineers will go to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, and startups. ARM is where these companies go to poach.
If it was too successful on its own it wouldn't be in all those devices. Whether or not it has the best chip designers its ARM that has changed the world.
It seems a bit like Linux to me - you could say Linus Torvalds is disappointing because he's not as rich as Elon Musk and yet one might argue both that he has done more and that if he had tried to get super rich out of it he would not have achieved so much because every effort to extract significant money would have lessened the breadth of his impact. People wouldn't have co-operated.
If you think about it, should any of the major players buy ARM and shut it down to the competition, the other players would be in deep trouble (Samsung, Apple, AWS, Google all depend fairly deeply on ARM). That has the potential to drive valuation up a bit, no?
The strength of ARM is that it's universal. If you shut down ARM to the public, then they will switch to RIS-V and suddenly, software will no longer support ARM.
If it's that simple, they would have done it a long time ago. In reality, many companies have very long-term contracts. For example, Apple may have an indefinite architectural license.
I haven't looked into all their changes in detail but they're not just going to suddenly increase profit without their customers fighting back.
"Arm China is 25% of our revenue, but we have no control over them, they have failed to pay us in the past resulting in us taking on additional costs to recover the money, also we have no way of knowing what they actually owe us and other than what they say, which has already been a problem"
The "ARM China going rogue" story is so weird. Although supposedly Softbank restored control last year? [1] So I don't know where things stand at the moment.
the article says that Wu is effectively still on the job, and Wu's own LinkedIn page claims he's still the boss there.
Having myself been part of a joint venture with the Chinese (in the education space), and having a Chinese employee go rogue, I only advise against western firms (even large ones with clout) from engaging in such ventures. The Chinese will take control by any means necessary and bleed you dry from the inside.
Which is terrifying - ARM's biggest risk in that regard is that ARM China can effectively shoot itself in the foot in the name of Chinese strategic/geopolitical/technological interests, and all their Chinese employees will have absolutely nothing to worry about.
96% gross profit margin? Ahh to be an IP licensing company....why would anyone invest in building physical things when there are opportunities like this out there! </s>
I'm not an accountant, but I think I'm referring to gross profit margin [1], which is revenue minus cost of goods sold (which is small for an IP licensing company, any company that actually sells hardware will be a fraction of that).
I think your math refers to operating margin, that's after they subtract all the operating overheads which are fixed, and not proportional to sales volume. In other words a 96% gross margin means they have virtually no friction to increasing sales.
Compare to Intel statement [2], they have a 35.8% gross margin and a negative operating margin this year, which would be the apples to apples comparison against 96% gross margin and 19.6% operating margin in the F1.
My read on the income line is they do a good job of 'spending money', but they are signaling that can be turned into things like dividends to shareholders once they IPO, perhaps by doing short sighted things like cutting R&D expenses and/or accounting tricks.
One option is to embrace it as an opportunity. ARM designs some pretty good CPU cores, so imagine they offered good RISC-V cores as well. RISC-V can be free, but a lot of companies still license core designs.
>ARM designs some pretty good CPU cores, so imagine they offered good RISC-V cores as well.
This is the approach MIPS took. They deprecated their legacy ISA, embracing the industry-standard RISC-V.
Problem is, ARM's management hasn't shown any signs of actually being capable of doing this. It would have to be replaced, and the business model would need a deep redesign.
But everything hardware takes a long time. Can ARM survive until they have competitive RISC-V designs ready?
For a SoC (or bigger uC) include both ARM & RISC-V cores. They can work side by side, be used as development platform for either, share memory or peripherals included in the SoC (or perhaps share different but overlapping subsets of those resources). Or a Big.Little style setup where the "Big" and "Little" are different ISA.
Where utilising chip resources 100% is not too important (like, in most applications), designers could simply work with the ISA cores they're comfortable with. Switch use to the other cores, use the same peripherals.
Would this be difficult to work with? Unlikely. Software support for such setups exists, suitable defaults / boot settings & go.
At the very least this would get ARM foot in the door if it turns out RISC-V eating ARMs market share (which is already happening, be it limited scale so far). Or collect the 'ARM tax' for SoCs whose designers wanted RISC-V but don't mind including ARM as well.
Interesting. As much as ARM-based processors are doing so well in the market, it's important to understand that ARM has specific licensing agreements with Apple, Samsung, etc. It is not so obvious that it will continue being a cash cow for many more years.
Well no one can predict the future but what's your reasoning that such an important technology partner to such massive companies will all of a sudden stop innovating and become less significant?
Apple never had the ability to develop custom x86 chips in house and were constantly at the mercy of Intel's timelines and product development priorities, as well as their extended issues shrinking their lithography below 14nm. ARM presents none of those issues for Apple - now they handle the design of their CPUs, prioritize whatever they want, and fab however many they need directly from whoever using newer processes that Intel still hasn't matched yet.
Intel is still around, still innovating, and still profitable. It has a lot more competition than in the past, but they are still a force to be reckoned with.
I'm pretty sure it's going to be one of these companies that I don't invest in for reasons that sound logical to me (a big part of the company just splitting in China basically rogue + my personal view that RISC-V will gain traction due to the licencing policies of ARM) that will do very well :D
I’m curious and haven’t seen anything regarding the ip theft of ARM by (???). Didn’t the Chinese arm of the business get taken over in some way? It made the news a few years back and nothing ever came out of it.
The Chinese subsidiary basically declared independence. Last I saw the two sides were at an impasse, and the Chinese sub was continuing to do its own thing - ARM parent appeared clearly to have the law and the facts on its side, but without the ability to enforce a foreign law judgment or get into an unbiased local court, what are you going to do?
Many. And still, many more are bought up every year. Those small M0 and M0+ cost pennies... if you made all chopsticks in the world out of M0s instead of wood, it would be more cost effective lol
(okay, maybe this is an exaggeration, but these small things are pretty much everywhere... not even speaking about chips in other, more complex devices)
The world is so dependent upon ARM’s designs, yet their revenue is relatively small. Public companies are expected to grow year after year after year. It will be interesting to see how they do that without becoming a competitor to their customers. I wish them good luck!
“Despite our significant reliance on Arm China through our commercial relationship with them, both as a source of revenue and as a conduit to the important [Chinese] market, Arm China operates independently of us,” the prospectus warned, adding that Arm did not have any direct management rights or the right to representation on Arm China’s board.
They have designed a processor architecture that is RISC-style. For some companies, ARM sells the design and others manufacture the chip. So what do Apple and Qualcomm get out of it, if they design their own architecture? Is apple tacking on proprietary extensions or instructions?
Why didn't apple design a CPU architecture from the ground up ala RISC-V?
Your confusion seems to have to do with microarchitecture vs ISA.
An ISA is the Instruction Set Architecture, the interface between software and hardware.
A microarchitecture is a hardware implementation of an ISA.
RISC-V is an ISA.
ARM is a company that has both an ISA (actually several, but their current is ARMv9) and a bunch of microarchitectures.
Their business model is to license their IP:
- They may license you a microarchitecture, so that you can include it in your chip's design.
- They may license you the ISA, so you can implement your own microarchitecture for the ISA. Note that you can't then license your microarchitecture to others, that's ARM's sole privilege.
RISC-V's instruction space has some room for custom extensions. Thus it can be adapted to find specific needs, without asking for permission nor opting out of the strongest software ecosystem which RISC-V is rapidly building.
But while RISC-V is pretty good technically, enabling the best processors, what's most disruptive is that it is an open ISA.
It means there's now an open market with RISC-V microarchitectures to license, from a range of vendors. There's also some open source microarchitectures.
Microarchitecture licensing aside, there's an ecosystem of companies offering related services, such as helping you verify your designs, trace your code and so on.
Depends on what you mean by usable. If you don't need long term support, strong software ecosystem support, and performance parity, it's great. It'll be a few more years before everything comes together, but hopefully not too many.
Reads like FUD, as you go on to list a bunch of items that RISC-V actually already delivers.
Point per point:
>long term support
Is achieved via upstreaming drivers[0] and providing documentation[1], something that e.g. StarFive is doing much better than Raspberry Pi ever has.
>strong software ecosystem support
RISC-V is rapidly building the strongest ecosystem.
>performance parity
JH7110 SoC used in boards like VisionFive 2 provides CPU performance between Raspberry Pi 3b and 4, at much lower power consumption.
TH1520 SoC used in boards like Sipeed Lichee Pi4A[2] provides performance above Raspberry Pi 4.
Both SoCs provide faster GPU (JH7110 is 4x that of Pi 4, TH1520 is faster), better hardware video codec blocks, cryptography acceleration, faster memory interface, faster I/O outside of the SoC and otherwise better and more built in peripherals.
Note: Raspberry Pi have been used as reference points as they are, by far, the most popular ARM SBCs.
>It'll be a few more years
As proven above, it's already there against the Raspberry Pi line.
But next year it'll be better, as RISC-V will finally compete with the fastest cores available. This is based solely on what's already announced (Ascalon, Veyron, P570 and so on).
The RISC V fanboism is rampant here with bunch of them repeating their marketing slogan in the comments. There is nothing inevitable about RISC V. If anything it has lot of mountains to climb before it can be considered a challenge to the existing instruction set. It may or it may not do that. Being open does not automagically make it happen.
"Being open does not automagically make it happen." Absolutely true. Many many "open" things have never gained traction and have fallen by the wayside. It was a plausible argument about RISC-V in 2016. It is not in 2023, when it has already happened.
Lots of companies have made their decisions, projects are kicking off -- for example Samsung just started porting .NET and Tizen to RISC-V for use in their future TVs and other products. LG similarly. It will take five years for the products resulting from that to emerge, but they are coming.
The RISC-V ISA didn't even formally exist as a frozen spec a little over four years ago. Ratification in July 2019 was the starting gun for many to start projects. The results of that are just emerging in the last months -- the VisionFive 2, tne Lichee Pi 4A, the 64 core Milk-V Pioneer.
A lot more things have gone into the pipeline since then, and will be emerging in the next two to three years. Things up to around Apple M1 performance ... from multiple companies.
Why would Apple ever want to own ARM? Their internal CPU design team is years ahead of the ARM team. Apple has an architectural license and doesn't care about ARM core designs.
Quite honestly, ARM falling on its face hard is actually a benefit to Apple. That would mean that Apple Silicon and iPhone SoCs have less competition. Imagine if Qualcomm chips based on ARM designs are 5 years behind instead of the 2-3 years now.
But the Nvidia + ARM combo made sense from a technical and strategic standpoint though.
I mean, the law can govern these things, but it's true that preventing the merger was a certain way to prevent them. And ensure that ARM never have the capital needed to become much more than they are today.
Nvidia dodged a bullet when the merger failed. ARM, not so much. I would be delighted to be proven wrong about all this by ARM's future success. Unless I succumb to the temptation to short the stock, in which case my happiness would be attenuated somewhat.
> Quite honestly, ARM falling on its face hard is actually a benefit to Apple. That would mean that Apple Silicon and iPhone SoCs have less competition.
No I didn't answer my own question because a hostile takeover of ARM can cost $70b and it doesn't guarantee that ARM would fall on its face after the acquisition because it has long-term contracts.
Sure, what other imaginary ways for Apple to destroy the competition do you have? Maybe buy Samsung and destroy the Galaxy brand? Buy Google and destroy Android?
Let us know what other genius ways you can think of.
Why because afaik they have a master IP license in perpetuity to ARM designs and they can chop and change what they want - nothing is stopping them from diverging from ARM reference designs completely and retaining just the instruction set because it is useful to tool vendors and programmers.
Ah, the Apple has a perpetual royalty free license meme. Almost certainly a myth.
Very, very unlikely anyone would get a perpetual license that covers all future products just because they were a founding shareholder.
I did some detective work on this a while ago for my newsletter (link in bio) from behind the paywall:
> … Apple and Acorn were paying royalty fees soon after they founded the company why should that change to grant Apple a royalty-free license at some point later?
Trouble is, its success and its sector has given it a profile that attracts attention from the likes of Softbank who have other ideas. A company doesn't need to have a Nvidia like P/E ratio to be successful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand