Arm, which designs chips for 99% of the world’s smartphones, is aiming to price its shares between $47 and $51 each when they hit the US stock market later this month. The firm’s Japanese owner SoftBank is hoping to raise as much as $4.9 billion when Arm starts trading on the Nasdaq, according to a Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That could rise to $5.2 billion if the banks underwriting the IPO exercise an option to buy additional shares from SoftBank.
In 2020, SoftBank tried to offload Arm to Nvidia for $40 billion, in what would have been the biggest chip deal of all time. But it didn’t pass muster with global antitrust regulators, and was called off in February 2022. Still, if the IPO values Arm at $52 billion, that would represent a retreat from the valuation of about $64 billion implied by SoftBank’s purchase of the remaining 25% stake in the company from its Vision Fund unit for approximately $16.1 billion just last month.