On Tuesday September 13, 2023 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, said Tuesday it approved an investment in Arm of up to $ 100 million when the British semiconductor designer goes public. Arm’s initial public offering (IPO) was slated for this week in the U.S. with shares being priced between $47 and $51. This would generate nearly $5 billion in fresh funds for the company and value it at more than $50 billion.The good news is that the IPO is already oversubscribed by 10 times and other technologies such as including Nvidia, Apple, and others were very much interested in purchasing up to $735 million worth of shares in the IPO.

     According to TSMC, investment in ARM is a strategic decision and is expected to cement the cooperation between the two because ARM creates the blueprint for chip architecture upon which 99 percent of the world's smartphone processors are based, will succeed. If it gets a stake in Arm, which is the world’s largest silicon chip intellectual property company, then TSMC will see bigger business opportunities and dividends on the front of orders related to artificial intelligence and next-gen emerging technology applications. In addition, TSMC and Arm have been partners for many years and signed a cooperation agreement as early as 2000. Therefore, holding a stake in Arm could be a big advantage for TSMC in securing orders and continuing to be the world’s largest contract chipmaker.

       Arm Holdings plc（stylised in lowercase as arm）is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England. Arm designs computer chips and makes money from companies that use its designs to build semiconductors. In practice, this means that the company generates very high-margin revenue, spends a large fraction of that revenue on research and development.Since 2016, it has been owned by Japanese SoftBank Group. In the year of 2020, Nvidia acquired the British chip company ARM from Japanese Softbank for $40 billion. As of today, Arm is the industry's leading supplier of microprocessor technology, offering the widest range of microprocessor cores to address the performance, power and cost requirements for almost all application markets.

      TSMC was founded in Taiwan in 1987 by Morris Chang. At that time, TSMC was the world’s first dedicated semiconductor foundry and has long been the leading company in its field. Mr. Chang retired in 2018 and Mark became Chairman and C.C. Wei became its Chief Executive Officer. However, most of this company is owned by foreign investors, and the central government of Taiwan is the largest shareholder. In 1997, TSMC is the first Taiwanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Most of the leading fabless semiconductor companies such as AMD, Apple,  Nvidia, are customers of TSMC. What’s most important, TSMC never stops its innovation momentum. According to its press conference, 3nm chips will be mass produced in the end of 2023 and 2nm will also be available to buyers by 2025. Based on China Brand Value Evaluation Standard, TSMC is a technology intensive, high-technology modern company and it will continue to be on the list of “The World Brand Value Top 900”.

       On the ranking of “The 3rd Daguan·Keweiwei World Brand Value Top 900” released on March 18, 2023, TSMC’s brand value was 525.262 billion RMB, ranking the 41st; Apple’s brand value was 2084.201billion RMB, ranking the 1st. Nvidia’s brand value was 570.376 billion RMB, ranking the 34th. Softbank’s brand value was 743.609 billion RMB , ranking 15th. 

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作者：杨瑞安