ARM hires hundreds of staff after Softbank takeover

UK tech giant ARM has already added "a few hundred jobs" after last year’s £24 billion takeover by SoftBank.

The UK Takeover Panel allowed the deal to go through on a number of conditions including that the chipmaker more than double headcount in the UK, which stood at around 1600, in five years.

Chief executive Simon Segars said the Cambridge-based company had increased the group headcount by several hundred since the deal and was ahead of the milestones agreed with the Takeover Panel.

“We are heavily investing in the UK. There was concern about whether SoftBank were going to rip the profits out of ARM, but none of that is happening,” Segars said at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.

“Already what we’ve told our teams is ‘go hire people to accelerate the execution of your roadmap. It’s got to show a return but go hire people’.”

He also said profits would come down because of increased spending on research and development, in order to “accelerate growth in the long-term”.

Segars hinted that SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son was encouraging ARM, which has completed three small acquisitions since the SoftBank takeover, to do big deals of its own.

“There’s certainly no pressure [to do a big deal], but the encouragement is ‘think in the broadest terms possible’,” he said.

Segars played down concerns raised by Son in his keynote speech at the show on Monday about the security of ARM’s chips. Son said that none of ARM’s chips, including in cars, were currently secure and could be hacked by “bad guys”.

“The security of cars is being enhanced all the time, the industry is on this. We’re doing our part in further enhancing the security in ARM processors” Segars said.

“It is entirely possible to build very secure systems around ARM processors today.”