This February, the Cambridge-based technology company Arm notched up a remarkable record: its semiconductor designs were incorporated into an astonishing 250bn computer chips. Another 1,000 were being added to that number every second, powering almost everything in our digital economy from smartphones to cars to data centres.
Little celebrated in its home market, Arm is one of the few British technology companies to count for anything in an industry dominated by US and Asian giants. “Here was a little speck of Britain pulsing with data billions of times over, right across the planet, largely unheralded outside its industry,” James Ashton writes in his sprightly corporate history.
Like many other promising British tech companies, Arm (which stands for Advanced RISC Machine) has been far more highly valued by foreign strategic investors than fickle shareholders in the City of London. In 2016 SoftBank Group, run by the maverick Japanese entrepreneur Masayoshi Son, snapped up the company for £24bn, a 43 per cent premium to its pre-offer share price. “One day, when I look back on my long life as an entrepreneur, I believe that Arm will stand out as the most important acquisition and investment I have made,” Son said, predicting the company’s chips would become ubiquitous as everything became digitally connected, featuring in running shoes, glasses and even milk containers.