the company would remain an independent subsidiary of
Softbank; he wouldn’t interfere in the day-to-day management
of Arm; and the company would be allowed to invest all the
profits into research and development.
“I was trying to play it as cool as I possibly could,” Segars
recalls. “We listened and you do what you’re supposed to
do, which is not agree to anything, say as little as possible.”
Segars and Chambers returned to Cambridge and relayed
the offer to the Arm board. In a week, a price was agreed; due
diligence was concluded in just two weeks; the whole process
took ten weeks. “To acquire a FTSE 100 company in that short
period of time was breathtaking,” says Ian Houghton, the
vice-president of investor relations for Arm. Rene Haas, the
president of Arm’s Intellectual Property Group agrees: “These
processes can drag on for years, but this was crazy fast. They
were like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Move this thing.’ It went
literally at the speed of light. I don’t think physics would’ve
allowed it to go any faster in terms of regulatory laws that had
to take place. It went down about as fast as it can possibly go.”
One Sunday, Arm’s executive committee, which up to that
point had not been privy to the ongoing negotiations, received
a text message from Segars convening a meeting that evening.
“I did what Simon told me not to do and I texted another
member of the exec committee who was due at the meeting,”
says Haas. “We were all like, ‘Simon is resigning? We had no
idea.’” That evening the Arm executives met in the company
boardroom. As well as beer and crisps, Segars served up a
revelation. “The cat is out of the bag,” he told them. “Tomorrow
it will be formally announced that SoftBank has bought Arm.”
To many of those in the room, the announcement made
no sense. Why would SoftBank, a Japanese telco, buy Arm, a
chip IP licensing firm? “I was thinking: who’s this Masa guy?”
Haas recalls. “What is he about? Does he really understand
what we do? I went home and googled SoftBank and Masa.”
On Monday, 18 July, 2016, Son started the day with an
early meeting with then British Chancellor of the Exchequer,
George Osborne. Following the Brexit referendum the
month before, the government was apprehensive about
a foreign takeover of what was the UK’s most valuable
technology company. Son agreed a post-offer undertaking
- a series of legally binding promises to the UK’s takeover
panel that, in the next five years, SoftBank would double
the headcount and keep the headquarters in Cambridge.
That morning, the announcement of the acquisition was
made: Arm had been bought by SoftBank for the price of £17
a share – £24 billion in total. Hermann Hauser, who had been
involved in the early days of Arm and is regarded
as one of the UK’s most influential entrepreneurs,
told the BBC it was a “sad day” for British tech.
That afternoon, Son travelled to Cambridge to
meet the members of Arm’s executive committee.
“He was beaming like a kid who just got a new toy,”
Haas remembers. “He was saying, ‘This is the most
exciting day of my life. I have been watching this
company for 30 years. I’ve just been so impressed
with everything the company’s done.’”
A month later, Arm’s executive team travelled
to San Carlos, California, to meet Son and their
counterparts at SoftBank International. The
British kicked off the meeting with a presentation
about revenue plans and forecasts for the next
four quarters. “He couldn’t be less interested,”
Haas says. “He was playing on his iPad.” However,
when they started talking about the vision for the
company, Son grew enthusiastic and he shared
his own 300-year vision. By 2035 there will be a
trillion connected devices, he said – a vast Internet
of Things of autonomous vehicles, smart robots and
artificially intelligent sensors, and Arm would be the
company behind all these devices. “He was literally
showing revenue charts and numbers out to 2035,”
Haas says. “I remember thinking that very first time,
‘Is this theatrics?’ But now I realise he just thinks
in a really big way. And you start thinking that if
you can possibly pull all this off, it’s actually crazy.”A Californian construction
company set up by Michael
Marks, Fritz Wolff and
Jim Davidson, it covers
every step from design
to assembly, building
features off site that
are then put together on
site. The goal is complete
vertical integration of all
the steps in construction
to allow a price guarantee
early in the process. It is
in discussions with firms
like Plenty and WeWork.Founded in 2013 by Ritesh
Agarwal when he was 19,
this is an India-based
hospitality startup. In the
second half o f 2017, O yo
Home was launched: an
Airbnb-type marketplace
for short-term managed
rentals that operates
in leisure destinations
across India, including
Pondicherry, Shimla
and Goa. Today, it has
hotels in the UK, China,
Indonesia and Singapore.The acquisition of Arm was Europe’s biggest ever
technology deal. It also marked the moment that
many people in Britain, including business and
technology insiders, had first heard of SoftBank.
That this relatively unknown Japanese telco was
in fact a heavyweight global investor came as a
revelation to most, despite its run of big-ticket
purchases. In 2013, SoftBank acquired US telco
Sprint for $22.2 billion, and Finnish games
developer Supercell for $1.5 billion. In 2014, it
had launched an investment outpost in California- a precursor to the Vision Fund called SoftBank
International, which had made early investments
in companies such as ride-sharing startups DiDi
in China and Ola Cabs in India, and Tokopedia, an
Indonesian e-commerce company that currently
has 80 million users. “We were a bit under the
radar,” David Thévenon, a partner at SoftBank,
says. “People were always confused by the name
SoftBank. ‘Are you a bank? Are you a mobile
operator?’ We had to keep explaining that we had
been doing international investments for years.”
And once SoftBank was finally a recognisable
name there was a new complication: it needed more
money to keep investing. Finding a solution for that
problem was the remit of a former Deutsche Bank
debt trader by the name of Rajeev Misra.
Misra grew up in New Delhi. In 1981, he enrolled at
the University of Pennsylvania to study mechanical
engineering and computer science. He then worked
at Los Alamos designing satellites, and on software
simulations at a Philadelphia-based startup called
Reality Technologies, before returning to business
school. Misra met Son in 2002, when he was global
head of credit, emerging markets at Deutsche Bank. PHO
TOGRAPHY:^ F.^ SC
OTTSCHAFERRight: Stewart
Butterfield,
co-founder of
Slack, in which
SoftBank took
a $250m stake