Read more.Newport Wafer Fab, in South Wales, was bought by Nexperia for approx £63 million.
Read more.Newport Wafer Fab, in South Wales, was bought by Nexperia for approx £63 million.
Then again its in wales, but I think you get my point.
AGTDenton (08-07-2021)
Yup, this was my first thought as well, now we are out of the EU we're going to be looking at sourcing and producing locally, so selling stuff off seems like a bloody daft idea really...
I wonder if this was some part of negotiation/trade deal and that's why the British Gov did sweet fanny adams.
Are we going to own anything just now. Only thing we haven't sold is the pound.
What a way to shoot yourself in the foot, jesus.
ARM is US owned. Imagination Technologies(thanks to Apple) is Chinese owned. GKN is owned by Venture capitalists. Cobham is now owned by a US private equity firm. Basically some of the most important technology companies in the UK are owned by mostly foreign countries.
Having said that this fab was already foreign owned,so it's transferring ownership to another foreign entity. But you might find some everyday names are Chinese owned - Odeon being one of them.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 06-07-2021 at 12:02 PM.
For now, it's Japanese owned unless authorisation is giving to Nvidia to acquire them.
My cynicism says that Nvidia will be all nicey nicey to start but will swiftly be used by the US Government to restrict who can use ARM around the world while Nvidia will slowly decay the ability for ARM to be impartial to all of its licensees for its own benefit.
We have never blocked recent acquisitions,so its seems like we just go through motions and some smaller customers have said they are OK with it. Due to the machinations of Apple,Imagination Technologies is now owned by Chinese backers.
Basically this is the beginning of the end of ARM IMHO. No country will want to be using ARM for important national products,because its very easy for the US not to allow export authorisations.
It could literally be a whole airliner for example,especially if a key part of the flight control system uses a chip that can't be substituted. IIRC,this has been done before.
As much as I agree we have to be wary of China,blocking the smartphone operations of Huawei seems to have been of no real use,apart from helping Apple. The block only happened after they went past Apple - it also mostly affected markets outside the US,where Huawei has more sway. It wasn't like Huawei or most of these Chinese companies have that much share in the US - they are mostly really popular in middle income and third world countries.
If anything,it seems even the EU and India,are moving towards RISC V.
I wonder how long before Reaction Engines is also swallowed up by a foreign company??
63 million plus the debits is chump change for any large building in the UK let alone the technology inside. We should be leveraging this sort of technology for the good of the UK, but won't as we just sell everything off for short term gain. No future planning at all from our government, it's all about the quick bucks now.
CAT-THE-FIFTH (06-07-2021),Phage (06-07-2021)
With the current global shortages and other issues, which have been shown during covid, the UK should be investing in bringing more of the things we import into this country not selling off what little we have....
http://www.radiofreemobile.com/usa-v...ductive-edges/
Explained in the link above, China cannot compete with TSMC its decades behind.
What it can do is compete in other niche areas which is why they bought the plant.
It's not some crazy important strategic asset to the UK, that's why its being sold and no-one is stupid enough to hand over the tech that would allow China to undermine TSMC, the would enrage the American establishment and provoke a response.
Last edited by Kato-2; 06-07-2021 at 12:30 PM. Reason: spelling
If you're wondering what kind of cutting edge process they support... 'from 0.18µm and above'.
So power, and maybe some RF stuff, but not much else.
Absolutely spot on.
Problem is, when things are privately owned, it's hard to prevent the owner selling them, unless government (i.e. taxpayers) care to step in on some kind of national security (i.e. protect our capability) basis, and buy it instead. Do we want to start effectively nationalising loads of stuff that falls into thar category?
And this is a bit different to installing Huawei gear inside critical national comms infrastructure.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
OK so i'll be more positive about this
Good news for the owners, hopefully a nice profit for them.
What's more interesting/revealing to me is that we actually have Fabs of this size in the UK - I didn't realise we had anything of this sort of scale, given the relatively high cost of labour int he UK, particularly skilled labour, as well as power/regulation/costs of doing business.
Long may it continue, and fingers crossed the increasing impact of Brexit doesn't hit them too hard!
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