INTERVIEW: Arm’s top executive explained the company would not be in the shape it is today without the backing of SoftBank, with a £24 billion takeover by the Japanese giant enabling it to embark on an ambitious growth strategy.

CEO Simon Segars (pictured) said SoftBank’s parentage has enabled Arm to invest “in a way that we just couldn’t have done as a public company”. For example, it is investing in multiple technologies at once, rather than having to prioritise one or two, and hired “a couple of thousand more engineers”.

Arm has also been empowered to go on the acquisition trail, with “a few key” deals in 2018 “helping us develop a software platform for IoT, so it’s enabling us to broaden our business,” he said.

This comes at a time when the focus of the technology industry shifts from mobile and smartphones to “things like autonomous driving, IoT, 5G networks”. SoftBank’s ownership is “giving us the opportunity and the scale and the resources to invest in technologies that those new market areas need, and bring those into our portfolio.”

Segars also said that, in line with earlier reports, another listing of Arm is in the pipeline, albeit “on a roughly five-year timeframe”.

However, for all of its investment in new areas, smartphones remain central to Arm’s work: “Our core, underlying technology driver remains around the smartphone sector: if you can develop technology for smartphones, you need to deliver super-high-performance and super-low cost, and super-energy efficiency, if you can get that right those core foundations of technology are useful everywhere else.”

Watch the full interview here.