Business Secretary Peter Kyle has said he would have intervened to block the sale of UK microchip company ARM Holdings had he been in government at the time of its 2016 purchase by Japanese firm Softbank.
Speaking during London Tech Week, Kyle told the BBC that ARM Holdings could have become the biggest firm on the London Stock Exchange if it had stayed, and "it would be 40% of the way there to the trillion-dollar company I think our country needs".
“Peter Kyle says he would have blocked Softbank's 2016 ARM Holdings sale to keep it in UK.”
The Cambridge-based firm was once considered the crown jewel of UK tech. It had been listed on the London Stock Exchange until Softbank bought it for £24 billion 10 years ago. Now listed on the New York Stock Exchange, it is worth £285 billion.
Kyle also said he "regretted" that UK-based pioneering AI company DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014, arguing that although it continues to operate in the UK, "the wealth that it has created is going elsewhere".
His comments came as the government set out how it would back British technology companies, while US tech giants SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for blockbuster share sales in New York.
"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."
The Business Secretary said the government was prepared to make bigger investments of taxpayer money in promising companies and create a cross-government concierge service to help companies get the skills, finance and support they need. He added: "I've upped the risk threshold. 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 recently announced substantial investments of public money in energy software company Kraken, self-driving firm Wayve and a UK tech focused investment fund Playground Global.
But while tech firms may be enjoying the government's help and generosity, Kyle admitted that other sectors are struggling, particularly hospitality, which has seen 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 announcement that business rate rises for pubs would be phased in more gradually than originally planned.