On 18th July 2016, it was announced that Japanese telecommunications corporation SoftBank had struck a deal with British semi-conductor design company ARM Holdings for £24.3 billion ($32 billion.) The acquisition is planned to be completed on 17th November 2016.

We have less than four months to stop this deal from taking place.

The UK government, British technology enthusiasts, and even Her Majesty the Queen herself have expressed how proud they are of how ARM Holdings has developed into one of the biggest, if not THE biggest tech company in the world. This pride has been further recognised when the company was given the Queen's Award in 2011 for its low-power, high-performance CPUs.

ARM Holdings shipped around 15 billion chips last year and the company's success has soared thanks to the emergence such as smartphones in 2007, and more recently, virtual reality (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive.etc) and augmented reality (Microsoft HoloLens, Pokemon Go.) ARM Holdings had an overall profit of almost £1 billion in 2015 alone.

On top of this, the Research & Development Society has warned that foreign takeovers such as this have rarely benefitted the UK. Case and point when Kraft bought Cadbury out, they went back on all of their promises in less than a week. Many fear that this will be the case with ARM Holdings. Employees of ARM Holdings have also voiced their concerns on Glassdoor, a site where staff can review their workplace, addressing the possibility that all of SoftBank's promises may have been forgotten in 5 or 10 years. (Sources: [1]​ [2])

It is also worth mentioning that SoftBank has accumulated $113 billion (approximately £86 billion) in debt. The acquisition will raise that debt to $145 billion. This massive debt has been a major concern among SoftBank's investors who have rejected the accquistion, however the CEO of the company, Masayoshi Son, has stated that he is willing to go on with the deal regardless. (Source)

Hermann Hauser, one of ARM's founders and key figures deemed the takeover "a sad day for technology in Britain." (Source)

The accquistion would likely have an impact on the tech industry, affecting businesses both in the UK and worldwide.

• ARM's CPU and Mali GPU core designs are priced competitively which is part of the reason why ARM enjoys the success it has had. If SoftBank buys the company, it's possible that they may hike up the price of these core designs. This is a real possibility considering how much debt SoftBank has right now. Big businesses won't be hit so hard by this, but small tech startups will likely suffer if this was to happen.
• ARM has always been a neutral company in the way that everyone is treated equally - no company gets access to ARM's core designs first. SoftBank is close to other companies, including Apple who Masayoshi Son greatly admires for its branding and positioning. This has raised concerns that other companies may be given preferential treatment when to comes to any new core designs by ARM. (Source)
• Another concern that has been raised by Hermann Hauser himself is that SoftBank could use ARM's money to pay off some of SoftBank's massive debt rather than spending it on researching new technology. This would result in technology progressing at a slower rate which would hurt ARM and would have a negative impact on global technology as a whole. (Source)

This petition calls upon ARM's shareholders to reject and block the accquistion deal. It also calls upon the new UK Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Theresa May MP, who has expressed her support for this deal, to reconsider her stance on the situation. It also calls upon the CEO of ARM Holdings, Simon Segars, to also reverse his decision and to keep ARM as an independent company. If ARM needs to work with SoftBank for whatever reason, a joint venture agreement should be considered instead.

That way, based on ARM's track record, we can be confident that the future of technology worldwide is in good hands and not in the hands of a company who up until this point, has been unknown to many tech enthusiasts and even many ARM employees, and has managed to rack up a huge debt. SoftBank simply cannot be trusted with ARM's future.

This is just an issue for the UK, but for technology everywhere. Please sign and help us stop this deal from taking place.