Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, has said he would have intervened to block the sale of UK microchip company ARM Holdings had he been in government at the time. The firm, once considered the crown jewel of British technology, was bought by Japan’s Softbank in 2016 before being listed in New York in 2023.
Kyle told the BBC that ARM could have become the biggest company on the London Stock Exchange had it remained in British hands. “It would be 40% of the way there to the trillion-dollar company I think our country needs,” he said. Cambridge-based ARM, which was listed in London until Softbank’s £24bn acquisition a decade ago, is now listed in New York and valued at £285bn.
“Peter Kyle says he would have blocked the £24bn sale of ARM Holdings to Softbank, calling it a missed opportunity for the UK.”
The Business Secretary’s comments came during London Tech Week as the government outlined a series of initiatives designed to attract and retain fast-growing technology companies. He also expressed regret over the 2014 acquisition of UK-founded artificial intelligence pioneer DeepMind by Google, saying: “The wealth that it has created is going elsewhere.”
“We need to learn from these experiences,” Kyle said. “Now, what I don’t want to do is be interventionist in a way that I’m just using the powers I have to block: what I do want to do is create the circumstances where they do not want to leave in the first place.”
To that end, the government is prepared to make bigger investments of taxpayer money in promising companies and create a cross-government concierge service to help firms secure the skills, finance and support they need. “I’ve upped the risk threshold,” Kyle said. “There are two risks. The first is that we get so slowed down by caution and anxiety about AI that we don’t embrace and shape it. The other risk is that we embrace and shape it and get some things wrong – I choose to take the latter.”
The government has already announced substantial public investments in energy software company Kraken, self-driving firm Wayve and a UK tech-focused investment fund, Playground Global. But Kyle acknowledged that other sectors are struggling, particularly hospitality, which has suffered from sharp rises in the national living wage and employers’ national insurance contributions. “Hospitality is stressed and I understand that,” he said, pointing to the government’s recent decision to phase in business rate rises for pubs more gradually than originally planned.