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NEW YORK (Reuters) -SoftBank Group Corp’s chip designer Arm Holdings Plc priced its U.S. initial public offering (IPO) at $51 per share on Wednesday afternoon at the top end of its indicated price range, people familiar with the matter said.
The IPO raised $4.87 billion for SoftBank (TYO:9984) based on 95.5 million shares sold. It infers a valuation for Arm on a fully diluted basis of $54.5 billion, making it the largest U.S. stock market debut since electric car maker Rivian (NASDAQ:RIVN) Automotive Inc in 2021.
The sources requested anonymity ahead of an official announcement. Arm and SoftBank declined to comment.
The Wall Street Journal erroneously reported earlier that Arm was preparing to price its IPO at $52 per share, which would have been over its indicated range. Reuters sources said that Arm discussed pricing the offering at $52 per share in a meeting with its investment banks, before settling at $51.
Arm’s shares are scheduled to start trading in New York on Thursday.
The IPO’s valuation represents a climb-down from the $64 billion valuation at which SoftBank last month acquired the 25% stake it did not already own in the company from the $100 billion Vision Fund it manages.
Yet even with this lower valuation, SoftBank would fare better than its $40 billion deal to sell Arm to Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA), which it abandoned last year amid opposition from antitrust regulators. SoftBank took Arm private in 2016 for $32 billion.
Arm has already signed up many of its major clients as cornerstone investors in its IPO, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Nvidia, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) and Samsung Electronics (KS:005930).
