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"If you do not make Arm a British owned company again with a Golden Share for national economic security, history will remember you as the person who, when the chips are down, failed to act in the national interest."
And then they blame this on the Prime Minister?
That said, I think such intervention is unlikely. UK law on overseas M&A is very open. Britain has a long-standing policy of encouraging foreign acquisitions, since it encourages inward investment and keeps the City of London relevant and flourishing as a major financial center. Many members of the ruling parties have personal and financial connections therein, and the UK's fraught divorce from the EU elevates the risks to London's ongoing relevance, so the incentives are skewed in favour of this sale.
The core of British trade policy is financial services i.e. invisible trade, not manufacturing, since competing on a playing field of physical scale (such as with manufacturing) is problematic for a small island nation. R&D is tolerated since it creates realisable value from (and for) the higher education sector, without dependence on a locally integrated manufacturing base. ARM itself is a microcosm of that strategy, designing chips but not making them; but by the same token, the value of that research was already fully realised by Softbank's acquisition.
https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/business/business-news/i-re...
It's possible they just didn't have the foresight. It's not unusual to take and action an not understand all the potential consequences.
> "If you do not make Arm a British owned company again with a Golden Share for national economic security, history will remember you as the person who, when the chips are down, failed to act in the national interest."
> And then they blame this on the Prime Minister?
It seems pretty fair to me. If a plane crashes because the pilot is irresponsible and the copilot decides not to take action, it's reasonable to put some of the blame on the copilot. It seems like the Prime Minister is like a guy at the emergency controls who's the last one with an opportunity to change course.
He did however campaign in the same way when it was being acquired by SoftBank.[0]
Nice.
> in·vid·i·ous /inˈvidēəs/ adjective (of an action or situation) likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others.
It’s relatively dismissive of the past to imply that it was not a lamented loss at the time, but it was a loss we learned of after the fact- not before it.
This is the earliest indication I can find:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112850
That was the same day the acquisition completed.
As far as ARM specifically well they have already revoked the licenses for Huawei and a few others and now there is the situation where ARM China is essentially a rogue entity being seized by the CCP.
I think the difference here is that now he thinks that a sale to Nvidia threatens Arm's business model, as now Nvidia will be deciding whether it wants to sell it's licences to it's direct competitors.
With Brexit looming, the UK needs a trade deal with the US. They aren't in a position of power to demand something like this.
The issues with a sale of this nature were obvious when it was sold to Softbank, much like the trade issues with Brexit were obvious years ago too. The UK governments decided to ignore both.
For there to be suffering there must be people who suffer. So who, concretely, in the UK has suffered from American technology dominance?
> As you have spent £500m to help OneWeb out of Chapter 11, which arguably is not as important to Britain as Arm, you could spend £1-2bn as the anchor investor for an IPO on the London Stock Exchange and get a Golden Share for it so that this problem cannot happen again.
Half a billion here, a few billion there. I cannot stand this kind of thinkig. Do you know how much a billion is? A million people will have to pay a thousand pounds more in taxes due to this jingoistic bullshit.
[0] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11299879 [1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11299879/filing-h...
It's financial records[0] make a lot more sense.
[0] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02557590/filing-h...
At the same time, which do you think is worse for the chip industry, ARM being owned by softbank or being owned by Nvidia?
Isn't UK still under most EU law until the end of this year?