ARM will reportedly lay off up to 1,000 employees after NVIDIA sale falls through

Up 1,000 ARM employees in the US and the UK will be laid off, according The Telegraph and Bloomberg. Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas reportedly told staff in a memo that the Softbank-owned chipmaker is cutting between 12 to 15 percent of its workforce, with 1,000 being the high end of that range, as part of its efforts to curb spending. The company said in a statement:

“Like any business, ARM is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline. Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce.”

Softbank was supposed to sell ARM to NVIDIA for a massive deal that was worth $40 billion based on the latter’s stock prices in 2020. If the acquisition had gone through, it would’ve been the largest in the chip sector yet and would’ve been worth around $60 to $80 billion today. The deal collapsed completely in February, however, due to strong opposition by regulators around the world. Industry players, including ARM customers Qualcomm and Microsoft, also voiced their opposition against the deal, citing concerns that NVIDIA might prevent ARM from licensing its chip designs. 

NVIDIA will pay Softbank a break fee of $1.25 billion for the failed purchase, and the Japanese conglomerate will proceed with its backup plan of taking ARM public. Neither of those is enough to keep things running as is, if the UK-based chipmaker is cutting jobs. Bloomberg says, though, that most of the job cuts won’t affect the company’s engineers. Despite the failed acquisition, NVIDIA plans to continue working closely with ARM and will continue to support the company as a licensee. 

CD 銷量 17 年來首度錄得正成長

雖然說音樂串流才是現代人聽音樂的主流，也是音樂產業主要的收入來源，但 CD 依然還是大有市場的。事實上，依據美國唱片業協會（RIAA）的年度銷量報告，由實體 CD 而來的營收在 2021 年增長了足足 21%，達到了 5.84 億美元。這是美國自 2004 年以來首度錄得 CD 營收的增長。…

CD sales rose for the first time in 17 years

While streaming is the music industry’s cash cow these days, CDs aren’t dead yet. According to the Recording Industry Association of America’s annual sales report, revenue from CDs grew by 21 percent to $584 million in 2021. That marked the first annual increase in CD revenue in the US since 2004. The RIAA notes that many record stores opened back up and artists sold music at shows again after COVID-19 put everything on hold in 2020.

As has been the case for the last 15 years, vinyl sales are continuing to grow too. Revenue rose by a whopping 61 percent in 2021 to $1 billion. It’s the first time vinyl sales have reached that milestone since 1986. Including other formats, physical music sales totaled $1.66 billion in the US last year.

The RIAA notes that the only major recorded music format to see a revenue decline last year was digital downloads. Sales dropped by 12 percent to $587 million — only $3 million more than CD revenue for 2021.

Streaming revenue, unsurprisingly, is still soaring. Including platforms like digital radio, total revenue rose by 23.8 percent to $12.4 billion last year. Paid subscriptions accounted for $9.5 billion of that (an increase of 23 percent from 2020). The RIAA said the number of paid subscriptions jumped up by 11 percent to 84 million on average. Figures can vary throughout the year as people cancel and sign up for memberships.

Even though artists have long been demanding higher per-play payouts from platforms, streaming is easily the most important moneymaker for the music industry, accounting for 83 percent of overall revenue. Despite that, the rise in physical media sales is encouraging for fans of that format, and should give artists some assurances they can still make money by selling CDs. Record stores are going to stick around for a while yet.

Google is buying cybersecurity company Mandiant for $5.4 billion

Google has todayannounced that it has signed an agreement to buy Mandiant, a notable cybersecurity company, for $5.4 billion. The unit, once acquired, will be folded into Google’s Cloud team to ensure that it can offer an “end-to-end security operations suite” for its business customers. Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia says that the deal will enable “organizations [to] effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” Google’s cloud platform is used by a number of major companies, and an outage towards the end of 2021 briefly knocked out Spotify, Snapchat, Etsy and Discord, amongst others.

Mandiant isn’t likely to be a name on everyone’s lips, but it’s one of those companies who gets called in whenever bad things go down. It discovered the SolarWinds hack, and it was hired by Equifax to look into its security practices after its massive security snafu in 2017, and T-Mobile entered into partnership with the company after its 2021 breach. It also works with major banks and governments to work on high-profile attacks involving state actors. Mandiant was previously a part of FireEye after being acquired in 2013, but the company was spun back out last year.

The news comes just a month after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring the company. It said that any deal would enable its new buyer to offer “unparalleled cybersecurity knowledge,” although Microsoft — obviously — subsequently pulled out of negotiations. But Google clearly feels that the deal is worth it, and is the second most expensive purchase the company has ever made, after its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola.

Microsoft completes its $19.7 billion purchase of voice-tech company Nuance

Microsoft has closed its $19.7 billion takeover of speech-tech company Nuance Communications. It announced the acquisition last April and cleared the final regulatory barrier this week when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority signed off on the d…