By Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Arm Holdings (ARM), a technology supplier to chip firms, is developing a long-term strategy to hike prices by as much as 300% and has discussed designing its own chips in a move to compete with its biggest customers.
At close: January 10 at 4:00:01 PM EST
For decades, the British firm kept a low profile while operating at the heart of billions of dollars of chip sales per year. It licenses the intellectual property that Apple, Qualcomm, Microsoft and others use to design their chips, charging a small royalty for each chip produced with Arm technology.
Despite being central to the rise of smartphones and energy-efficient data center chips, Arm has remained small compared to its customers, with $3.23 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024. In its most recent fiscal year, Apple’s revenue from its hardware products, which are all powered by Arm-based chips, was more than 90 times larger.
But Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank Group, which owns 90% of Arm, and Arm CEO Rene Haas, are determined to change that, according to plans revealed in a trial last month in which Arm aimed unsuccessfully to secure higher royalty rates from Qualcomm. The details of Arm’s ambitions, which were described in court testimony and documents that remain under seal, have not been previously reported.
Arm and Qualcomm declined to comment.
Known in its early stages as the “Picasso” project, Arm’s plans, which date back to at least 2019, aim for a roughly $1-billion increase in annual smartphone revenue over about 10 years, according to sealed executive testimony.
Arm planned to achieve this partly by increasing the per-chip royalty rates that customers pay for ready-made parts of chip designs that used its latest computing architecture, called Armv9.
During trial, documents were shown from August 2019 in which Arm executives discussed a 300% rate increase. In December 2019, Arm’s then-CEO Simon Segars told Son, Arm’s board chairman, that Arm had secured a deal with Qualcomm to use ready-made technology under the “Picasso” initiative.
But Qualcomm and other large customers such as Apple are sophisticated enough to design their own chips from scratch using Arm’s architecture without needing Arm’s higher-priced ready-made offerings, meaning they would not necessarily be subject to all of those rate increases.
“We have rough legacy agreements with Qualcomm and Fender,” Haas said in a Microsoft Teams chat held the day Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021, shown at trial. The startup would help Qualcomm use less of Arm’s ready-made technology.
