Arm’s plan to raise prices ahead of IPO is a risky bid to boost profitability
UK chip design giant Arm is reportedly planning price hikes for some of its biggest customers as it implements a new business model. The move from Arm’s parent company SoftBank is part of measures designed to increase profitability ahead of its impending IPO.
The Cambridge-based company provides designs for chips in the vast majority of smartphones, including the iPhone, and its blueprints are increasingly being used Arm’s new pricing strategy will see customers billed based on the value of the final device a chip is used in, rather than the value of the chip itself.
The new pricing could be put in place as early as next year, and Arm has already been sounding major customers such as Qualcomm and Mediatek about the plan, according to the FT, which first reported the story and cites industry insiders familiar with the scheme.
Apple, which has a special royalty agreement with Arm, will not impacted, the FT says. The changes would mainly affect the company’s Cortex A design range used in high-end smartphones.
Tech Monitor has approached Arm for comment.
Since SoftBank purchased Arm for £24bn in 2016, the company has been beset When the Nvidia deal was cancelled, SoftBank announced plans to relist Arm on the public markets, and despite heavy lobA chipset for a 5G mobile device costs an average of $45-$50, according to figures from Counterpoint Research, and Arm currently takes royalties of 1%-2% on chips based on its designs. With the price of manufacturing a smartphone running into hundreds of dollars, collecting a chunk of these royalties could potentially be much more profitable for Arm.
Though charging royalties based on the finished device is common for other technology companies, Arm may face a tough task if it asks its customers to pay considerably more for the same product they already receive. It is already at loggerheads with Qualcomm, one of its longest-standing partners, over a potential licensing breach resulting from Qualcomm’s purchase of AI chip start-up Nuvia in 2021.
And while Arm’s dominance in the mobile space is almost total, customers are not without other options should they decide the new prices are not to their liking. The growing maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem, an open-source, royalty free architecture, could offer alternative to Arm’s blueprints, and in January it was announced that Google’s Android mobile operating system will support RISC-V architecture alongside Arm and Intel’s X86.
RISC-V chips that can compete with the Cortex A and Arm’s other top-of-the-range designs are not yet on the market, but speaking to Tech Monitor last year, Gartner vice president analyst Alan Priestley said enterprise buyers are increasingly looking at alternative architectures. “A lot of companies are looking at alternate sources of IP, maybe not switching totally away from Arm, but having the option of Arm or RISC-V in their products,” Priestley said. “RISC-V was already gaining traction before SoftBank decided to try and offload Arm, and I think that has increased the focus of some of the semiconductor companies on RISC-V as an alternative.”