How Britain abandoned its technology companies
Britain can build technology champions, but without the ecosystem that results from successful tech firms, our country's talent will go elsewhere
This year marks the tenth anniversary of an event that has proved to be of huge consequence for the UK stock market. No, not the Brexit referendum – 2016 was the year in which Japanese company SoftBank, led by founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son, acquired the UK's leading technology company, Arm, for £24 billion. Unlike American investors, professional UK fund managers became permanently disillusioned with the technology sector as a result of the collapse of the technology, media and telecoms bubble in 2000-2002, and so were delighted to be shot of its flagship domestic representative at a 40% premium to the prevailing share price.
With the yield on ten-year gilts at historic lows below 1.5%, pension funds were desperate to ditch equities and buy even more gilts, even leveraging up in their chase of the “liability-driven investment” delusion, which was to cost them hundreds of billions six years later. New solvency rules introduced after the 2008 financial crisis required insurance companies to invest in “safer, more liquid” securities, that is, short-dated gilts. Wealth managers could crow to their clients about short-term performance.
Only one major investor vehemently disagreed; James Anderson, the then manager of Scottish Mortgage Trust, bitterly criticised the sell-out on behalf of Baillie Gifford, with a holding of more than 10%. “We found it deeply depressing that Arm's management, and particularly its chairman, were so influenced by short-term shareholders.” Anderson said it was a premature sale of the UK's leading technology and intellectual property champions, “Britain's sole serious shot at building a global tech giant”.
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In September 2023, Arm again went public when SoftBank floated the company on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of £40 billion, while retaining 90% of the shares. Unsurprisingly, pleas to list the shares in London were shunned, though Arm remains a Cambridge-based company. Since then, the shares have multiplied more than sixfold, although they are now down 17% from their early June peak.
Had Arm listed in the UK, it would be by far the biggest company on the London Stock Exchange. London is now only the world's eighth-largest stock market, accounting for just 3.1% of the MSCI All Countries World index. It has been steadily slipping down the rankings owing to its low exposure to the technology sector, which accounts for just 1% of the FTSE 100. This compares with 8%-9% in Europe, 27% in the US (not including Alphabet and Amazon) and 37% in Asia.
Britain's technology firms are condemned to stagnation
Also easily forgotten is the 2014 sale of Britain's DeepMind, a pioneer in AI, to Google for just £400 million. In 2006, US-based Illumina bought Solexa, the UK-based inventor of gene sequencing, for £315 million. It became the key building block in Illumina's climb to a market value of more than £50 billion (although the shares have fallen by two-thirds in the last five years). These and other examples show that Britain has a good record of creating and building technology champions, but that unambitious management, combined with uninterested and short-sighted institutional investors, means that they sell out rather than scale up in the way that American giants have shown is possible.
Without the “ecosystem” that results from successful technology firms, Britain's pool of talent will go elsewhere, there will be no pool of capital looking for the next potential breakthrough, a diminishing appetite for risk and no list of success stories to inspire future entrepreneurs. The London Stock Exchange has become a value trap – a shrinking pool of reasonably managed solid businesses with mediocre prospects. Such a market can have an occasional catch-up year of outperformance, but without a cadre of proper growth firms, is condemned to an ever-shrinking share of global capitalisation. Arm's sale to SoftBank, now Japan's largest company, didn't start this process, but it marked the point at which it became irreversible.
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