The Japanese owner of the British chip designer Arm has said that London is still in the process of listing the company on the stock exchange, following intense pressure to bring the initial public offering to the UK.
SoftBank Group chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son told shareholders at the investment giant’s annual meeting that the U.S. technology-focused Nasdaq stock exchange remained his “main preference”.
However, he also stressed that no decision had been made, and was also “studying” a London list.
“We have received requests from several people in the UK to include our company in London,” Son told SoftBank’s annual general meeting, the Nikkei news service reports.
“We’re getting strong love calls. Our main preference is Nasdaq, but we haven’t decided yet. I’d like to study a little more and make a final decision.”
It has been seen that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, joined the pressure efforts of government officials and executives of the London Stock Exchange to try to persuade Arm to float in London, and culminated in Johnson writing a letter to the heads of SoftBank.
Arm has more than 500 customers who use its chip designs, including Apple, Samsung and Google, in products ranging from iPads and cell phones to cars and smartphones, and analysts have estimated that the company could worth up to $ 40 billion (£ 32.1). bn) when it is made public.
Son has already rejected London for the listing of Arm, saying in February: “The Nasdaq stock exchange in the US, which is at the heart of global high technology, would be the most suitable.”
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The UK government has tried to make London more attractive to technology companies, even through last year’s controversial decision to give founders more control, through dual-class action structures and reducing the number of shares to be offered to the public only 10%.
SoftBank, which bought the Cambridge-based chip company for $ 32 billion in 2016, has been searching for the list of Arms since its potential sale of $ 66 billion to Nvidia, based in the United States, it collapsed earlier this year after regulatory hurdles on both sides of the Atlantic.
Son has invested in numerous companies in recent years, including the Uber shared travel app and, famously, the WeWork office company, which pushed the Japanese investment company to a quarterly loss of 704 billion yen. (£ 5 billion).