ARM

ARM is a British semiconductor design company that serves as the basis for smartphone chip design around the world. Softbank is the majority shareholder.

ARM is a British company that creates blueprints (architectures) for semiconductor chips and sells them under license. It has a unique business model of providing a design basis without producing chips directly, and almost all of the world's smartphone chips are made based on ARM designs. Softbank of Japan is the majority shareholder and is listed on the U.S. stock market.

The reason ARM is attracting attention in the AI era is its power efficiency. ARM designs have the advantage of operating with low power, and are expanding beyond smartphones to include laptops and data center servers. Arm-based CPUs are also used in NVIDIA's AI chips, and ARM's design is permeated throughout the AI infrastructure.

Given that almost all major chip companies, including Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung, are customers of ARM, it is evaluated as a company that rides on the growth of the entire semiconductor ecosystem regardless of the success or failure of a specific company.

✅ Strengths

• It has a solid ecosystem that virtually monopolizes smartphone chip design
• It is expanding into the server and AI infrastructure market thanks to its strength in power efficiency
• Since it is a licensing business model, we generate stable profits without burdening production facilities.

⚠️ Limits

• There is a risk of conflict with customers, such as a licensing dispute with major customer Qualcomm.
• RISC-V (Risk Five), an open source design, is mentioned as a long-term replacement threat.
• There is controversy over overvaluation as the corporate value is high compared to performance.