ARM says hands off

The chief executive of chip design company ARM has issued an appeal to shareholders to keep the company independent.

Warren East, chief of the Cambridge-based company, said that rumours of a take-over by Intel or Apple do not make sense for the business. Apple already uses ARM designs for its iPad and iPhone devices.

"If you look at the end customer, like an Apple, or any company within the ecosystem at any particular point in the value chain, if one of those companies were to acquire Arm - well, why?" East told The Telegraph on Tuesday.

"They either want access to the technology, which they have already, or they want to prevent competitors from gaining access to it. In reality it doesn't work very well...If you want to prevent your competitors getting the technology, it's not a very good way of doing it," he added.

East also said that any deal involving Intel would attract a lot of regulatory scrutiny and that he feels the company could not be sold off without "diminishing part of the value of ARM".

Speculation about a take-over offer grew as a result of HP's $12.5bn (£7.1bn) purchase of another Cambridge-based software company, Autonomy, but East suggested that bids for ARM should be rejected.

"HP gives Autonomy a great platform for growth but there is [already] tremendous potential for the ARM business to grow a great deal further and it can do that from a position of independence in Britain. We just don't need it," he said.