ARM laid off 20% of its staff in the UK
On October 5, IT Home reported that ARM, a low-power chip design company, had reduced the number of employees in the UK by 20%, according to the Financial Times. The move violates the recruitment commitment made by Softbank to the British government when it acquired the technology company in 2016.
ARM makes money by selling licenses to Apple, Samsung and other companies to produce its chips, but it does not produce any products. It is increasingly interested in its processors: the rise of low-power development boards such as Raspberry Pie and many alternatives, the M series of Apple Silicon in the computing world, and the emergence of higher power Qualcomm chips in laptops and high-end smartphones.
Compared with employees in other countries, 18% of the global layoffs seem to fall more on British employees. The number of employees around the world has decreased by 550, but 700 jobs in the UK have been terminated. In the UK, ARM has 3500 employees, but it has now reduced to 2800 after layoffs. The move came after the failure of Nvidia's acquisition, which was valued at $66 billion. Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, recently welcomed the update of the members of the Board of Directors of the Company. He previously said that the Company needs to avoid duplication of work, control the work of non critical projects, and implement more strict management of administrative expenses.
However, this move aroused the anger of Unite, the British trade union, which in March this year called for the suspension of layoffs so that the financial inspection could find out whether the company really needs layoffs. The company's net income in the nine months ended December 31, 2021 had just exceeded $2 billion (about 14.16 billion yuan), but the profit was only $260000 (about 1.841 million yuan). At that time, an ARM spokesman's statement indicated that "12% - 15%" employees may be affected. IT Home learned that due to the huge write down of investment valuation, Softbank itself reported a huge loss of US $23.4 billion in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 (starting from September 1, 2022).
When Softbank took over ARM UK in 2016, it promised to double its workforce and achieved this goal by hiring 1730 new employees, bringing the number of UK employees to 3500. Today's announcement shows that 40% of the employees have been laid off.
ARM, which is expected to go public but has not yet announced its IPO, has released 373 recruitment positions in the UK, most of which are engineering positions.
