IT House reported on October 5th, according to the
"Financial Times" report, low-power chip design company ARM has
reduced its UK staff by 20%. The move goes against a hiring promise SoftBank
made to the UK government when it bought the tech company in 2016.
ARM makes money by selling licenses to other companies
like Apple and Samsung to make its chips, but doesn't make any of its own, and
it is increasingly interested in its processors: low-power development boards
like the Raspberry Pi and The rise of its many alternatives, Apple Silicon's M
series taking the computing world by storm, and higher-power Qualcomm chips
appearing in laptops and high-end smartphones.
The 18% of global layoffs appear to be falling more on UK
workers than workers in other countries . 550 staff have been cut around the
world, but 700 jobs have been terminated in the UK. In the UK, ARM has 3,500
employees, but it has now been reduced to 2,800 after layoffs. The move comes
after a failed takeover by Nvidia, which valued the company at $66 billion.
ARM's chief executive, Rene Haas, recently welcomed the update to the company's
board of directors, having previously said the company needs to avoid
duplication of effort, control work on non-critical projects, and implement
stricter management of overhead.
The move, however, has drawn the ire of UK union Unite,
which in March called for a moratorium on layoffs so that a financial check
could find out if the company really needed to cut jobs, which it did in the
nine-month period to December 31, 2021. According to records the net income was over 2 billion
US dollars (about 14.16 billion yuan), but the profit was just 260,000 US
dollars (about 1.841 million yuan) . A statement from an ARM spokesman at the
time suggested that "12%-15%" of employees could be affected. IT
House has learned that SoftBank itself reported a huge loss of $23.4 billion in
the first quarter of fiscal 2023 (starting on September 1, 2022) due to the
huge write-down of investment valuations.
SoftBank pledged to double its workforce when it took
over Britain's ARM in 2016, and has achieved that by hiring 1,730 new workers,
bringing the UK workforce to 3,500. Today's announcement shows that 40% of
those employees have been laid off.
ARM, which is expected to go public but has yet to
announce an IPO, has posted 373 jobs in the UK, most of which are in
engineering.
source: https://www.sina.com.cn/
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