|  Updated: 

London Stock Exchange ready to ‘fight’ for Arm listing, says boss

By:

City Editor

Add as a preferred source on Google
A group of LSEG investors including Blackstone and Thomson Reuters are offloading a four per cent stake in the firm worth £1.9bn, the London Stock Exchange owner has said today
LSEG has said it will buy back around £500m of the shares as part of the deal.

The boss of the London Stock Exchange said the bourse was willing to “fight” to win the listing of British chipmaker Arm today after reports its Japanese owner Softbank has downed tools on a London listing.

Ministers and officials at the London Stock Exchange have been lobbying Japanese investment group SoftBank in recent months to ‘bring Arm home’ with a listing for Arm in London. 

SoftBank was reportedly angling for a dual listing in London and New York but the resignation of several key players in the charm offensive including investment minister Gerry Grimstone has put the plans on hold, the Financial Times reported this week.

Boss of London Stock Exchange Julia Hoggett said today the cause was not lost, however.

“I want to win every single offering that I can do and I also feel very strongly there is a very compelling case for Arm to have a dual premium listing in the UK,” Hoggett told Bloomberg Television this morning.

Hoggett pointed to the fact that Arm’s listing in London prior to being taken private by SoftBank in 2016 had fetched a higher valuation than comparable firms globally.

“We’ve been working very hard. I describe the energy that I have to winning anything as being that we have to be young, scrappy and hungry,” she said. 

“We should absolutely fight for anything that we think we have a compelling strategy to propose.”

SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son has said previously he favours a listing on the Nasdaq, where tech firms typically garner higher valuations due to a deeper pool of tech investors.

A snub by Arm would strike a major blow to London’s efforts to promote itself as a hub for tech IPOs. 

It was revealed yesterday that Hoggett will also now chair a taskforce overseeing the competitiveness of London’s capital markets in a bid to boost their appeal internationally.

The London Stock Exchange said yesterday the “UK has a superb start-up ecosystem, with world leading universities, a unicorn being created on average every 27 days” but “not all of those great companies reach the scale they need or secure financing in the UK.”