UK technology firm ARM Holdings is to be bought by Japan’s Softbank for £24bn ($32bn) it confirmed on Monday.
The board of ARM is expected to recommend shareholders accept the offer – which is around a 43% premium on its closing market value of £16.8bn on Friday as reported by BBC business news.
The Cambridge-based firm designs microchips used in most smartphones, including Apple’s and Samsung’s.
ARM, which was founded in 1990, employs more than 3,000 people. ARM said it would keep its headquarters in Cambridge and that it would at least double the number of its staff over the next five years.
Softbank has previously acquired Vodafone’s Japanese operations and the US telecoms company Sprint. The $20bn deal was the biggest foreign acquisition by a Japanese firm at the time.
Five years ago, Cambridge was home to at least three world-beating UK-owned technology firms, ARM, Autonomy and Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR).
Then Autonomy was swallowed up by HP in an ill-fated deal, last year the chipmaker Qualcomm bought CSR, and now the biggest and best, ARM, is about to have a Japanese owner.
The Japanese firm bought France’s Aldebaran robotics business and has gone on to give it a global profile.
Softbank intends to preserve the UK tech firm’s organization, including its existing senior management structure and partnership-based business model, ARM said.
Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of Softbank, said: “This is one of the most important acquisitions we have ever made, and I expect ARM to be a key pillar of SoftBank’s growth strategy going forward,
“We have long admired ARM as a world renowned and highly respected technology company that is by some distance the market leader in its field.”
Mr Son added: “ARM will be an excellent strategic fit with the Softbank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the internet of things”
ARM Holdings is arguably the most precious jewel in the crown of British technology, its microchip designs are used in billions of devices.
Sources close to the deal say the Japanese company considers ARM well placed to exploit the so called “internet of things” which may see microchips embedded in whole new categories of household and business devices.