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At SoftBank, a reported battle over pay with COO Marcelo Claure adds to other bad news



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Not for the first time, SoftBank is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. Indeed, even while the Japanese conglomerate is known for its extremes — be it bold bets, internal squabbles, soured business relationships, or its ability to repeatedly bounce back from the brink — some newer developments could prove particularly hard, if not impossible, to overcome.
The worst of these, seemingly, is the lawsuit filed yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission to block chipmaker Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm, the British company that licenses chip technology, out of stated concern that the deal would give Nvidia too much control over computing technology.
“Tomorrow’s technologies depend on preserving today’s competitive, cutting-edge chip markets,” Holly Vedova, the director of the agency’s competition bureau, said in a related statement. “This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals.”
The problem for SoftBank? A scuttled deal could means tens of billions of dollars to the outfit, which acquired the now 21-year-old Arm in July 2016 for $32 billion before selling it to Nvidia in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $40 billion. It’s even worse than it sounds. Nvi …

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