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Nvidia just purchased ARM for $40 billion
No immediate changes to Arm's open-licensing business are planned
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Arm Holdings is the company behind ARM processors, which power nearly every smartphone and tablet on Earth. SoftBank purchased Arm in 2016, and has been shopping around for potential buyers over the past few months. After days of speculation, it's now official that Nvidia is closing a deal to acquire ARM.
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Last week it came to light that SoftBank may be trying to sell chipset design firm ARM, and according to a new report from Bloomberg, Nvidia could be interested. Citing the usual "people with knowledge," Nvidia has apparently approached ARM to court a deal with the Cambridge company.
SoftBank could sell or spin off Arm way sooner than it planned
The decision could lead to a massive paradigm shift
SoftBank is reportedly assessing spin-off options for its semiconductor firm, Arm Holdings. The Wall Street Journal reports from its sources that those options include having an initial public offering or a sale. The Japanese tech conglomerate picked up Arm back in 2016 for $32 billion and currently shares some ownership with investors in the SoftBank Vision Fund.
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T-Mobile's boisterous and pugnacious CEO John Legere is in the news again, and this time, it's not for calling Verizon and AT&T "dumb and dumber" or cursing up a storm at some event. According to the Wall Street Journal, John Legere has been singled out as a possible pick for the top CEO position at WeWork.
About a year ago, Google announced the Android Enterprise Recommended program. It includes a list of Android devices that are ideal for business use and comply with certain guidelines (running a recent version of Android, supporting zero-touch enrollment, etc.). For companies looking to deploy a large number of phones, Google also now has a set of recommended Enterprise Mobility Management providers.
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- More details for the potential merger have been revealed today by Bloomberg. Word is that Sprint is being valued at around $24 billion in the deal, which will see T-Mobile receive a 42% stake in the resulting company, with a larger 69% voting interest. That price values Sprint at around $6.10 a share, which Bloomberg notes is below the $6.50 price set at the end of trading today.
Sprint and T-Mobile weave a complicated relationship. For years they've desired each other, drawn inexorably to that most corporate copulation: the merger. In a landscape run by AT&T and Verizon, the two star-crossed lovers have struggled separately to carve a little chunk of the world (including the US telecommunications market) for themselves. And, according to a report by Reuters, after a long and conflicted courtship, their paths and profits may soon be joined.
A few days ago, some users started receiving update notifications on their Pixel 2 and were wondering what was happening since, according to the official documentation, they were seemingly on the latest build number. Now Google's official pages have been updated to include these new factory images and OTA files for specific devices on certain carrier versions.
After the "will they or won't they" mess of negotiations between Deutsche Telekom, the reluctant owner of T-Mobile US, and SoftBank Corp., the owner of Sprint fell apart once again, SoftBank has announced their intent to increase their ownership stake in Sprint. This change would increase SoftBank's control of the US's 4th largest mobile network operator from 80% to 85%.
Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, has made no secret of his plans to become "the biggest investor in technology over the next decade". Last year the Japanese corporation acquired ARM Holdings, and it already had a controlling stake in the US carrier Sprint. Son has even set up a special Billion Vision Fund, which aims to raise $100 billion for the purpose of making strategic technology investments. It's now come to light that SoftBank has used some of the capital to amass a roughly $4 billion stake in the chipmaker Nvidia.
Look at your smartphone. Odds are very, very good that it's running a chip with ARM-designed components, or at least the ARM instruction set. UK-based ARM Holdings has become an integral part of mobile computing, and Japan's SoftBank wants a piece of that. The companies announced today that SoftBank will acquire ARM Holdings for about $32 billion.
Things haven't been looking up for Sprint ever since the rumored T-Mobile merger failed to happen. There's a new CEO and the carrier has been slashing prices, but it continues to lose cash. Now, Sprint's Japanese parent company SoftBank has announced plans to cut several thousand jobs at Sprint in order to reduce costs.
Sources are saying that Sprint will soon offer a Sony smartphone in the US for the first time. We can't tell you who these sources are, but they're the kind that have spoken to Reuters and The Wall Street Journal in two separate reports. And the device apparently won't be cheap either. We're talking about an upcoming Xperia flagship. With Sony expected to unveil the Z3 at IFA next week, well, you can fill in the blanks from here. The phone will reportedly be available in time for winter holiday season.
Phones produced for the Japanese market are usually so radically different than the ones we're used to that you don't really feel like you're missing anything. However, the new Sharp Aquos Crystal may pique your interest. The difference is that you might have a chance to buy this one soon. This device comes in two sizes—5-inches and 5.5-inches. Both of them have teeny tiny, miniscule bezels. Almost none of the body peeks out from the edge of the screen.
It's not much of a surprise at this point, but the Federal Communications Commission has approved the tri-company merger deal involving Japanese carrier SoftBank, Sprint, and Clearwire. The FCC ruling follows Justice Department approval several weeks ago, and some delicious drama that ended with Dish Network being shut out of the deal.
On today's episode of All My Mergers And Acquisitions, the long-running Sprint bidding war between Dish Network and Japanese carrier SoftBank appears to be over, at least for the moment. After SoftBank increased its Sprint bid to 21.6 billion dollars for 78% of the company last week, and Sprint subsequently sued both Dish and Clearwire for getting in the way of its corporate matchmaking, Dish has withdrawn its offer. According to Reuters, the company stated that submitting a new offer by today's deadline was not practical.
SoftBank Raises Bid For Sprint To Ward Off Dish Network: $21.6 Billion For 78% Stake In Wireless Carrier
Oh, what a tangled web gigantic mega-corps weave. Japanese telecom SoftBank wants to get its hands on an American wireless carrier, come Hell or high water,
Oh, what a tangled web gigantic mega-corps weave. Japanese telecom SoftBank wants to get its hands on an American wireless carrier, come Hell or high water, and they've just outbid Dish Network to do so. According to Reuters, Softbank has upped its bid from October of last year to $21.6 billion USD for 78% control of Sprint, topping its previous commitment of $20 billion for 70%. Dish Network is currently offering $25.5 billion in a mix of cash and stock for an outright sale, about 10% less on a share-by-share basis.
DISH Proposes Alternative Sprint Buyout Plan, Is Not So Secretly Gunning For Clearwire Holdings
Sprint is currently in the midst of a buyout with Japanese company SoftBank that would give the foreign telecom control of not only the Now Network, but
Sprint is currently in the midst of a buyout with Japanese company SoftBank that would give the foreign telecom control of not only the Now Network, but Clearwire as well, and infuse the company with some much-needed cash. Dish Network, however, hopes to derail these plans with a bid of its own, offering more cash than Softbank has on the table, as well as synergy with its existing television and and broadband packages.
AT&T has a problem on its hands. It's big, but is it big enough? If you're a CEO of a major corporation the answer to that question is always "no." However, the carrier has difficulty expanding on the home front. An overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens have phones with one carrier or another, so there's very little wiggle room to grab new customers. And gaining in market share when you (and all your competitors!) are dead set on locking people into two-year contracts is very difficult. In short, growth isn't much of an option outside acquisitions, and those haven't gone so well.
You know the drill by now. It's time for some new LTE market announcements! Woo! Party hard. The network rollouts today are coming to Pennsylvania, California, Indiana, Virginia and Puerto Rico. This comes on the heels of Sprint announcing its intention to purchase the remaining shares of Clearwire that it didn't already own.
Today, Sprint announced that it would be spending $2.2bn to acquire the remaining (roughly) half of Clearwire that it doesn't already own. The transaction, which is naturally subject to regulatory approval, will give the carrier ownership of all of Clearwire's significant share of spectrum, which will be a huge boost to Sprint as it attempts to build out an LTE network to compete with Verizon and AT&T.