>i find the current valuation ludicrous, and it seems like it's pushed more by Softbank's Vision Fund than a firm grasp in reality.
Just for comparison, AMD, which is still quite small, gets about $2b - $4b annual net profit. Intel, before their recent disaster quarters, had as much as $24b in annual net profit.
$524m in net income is peanuts compared to the big boys. This is what I was saying in my original post. ARM is a more valuable company if they were acquired by Nvidia. As a standalone company, it's not that great. Again, a weird quirk of ARM is that their biggest customers are also their biggest competitors. This puts a cap on how much profit they can make. If ARM decides to raise licensing fees exponentially, which is likely not simple due to long-term contracts, then companies will seriously look to RISC-V.
Because ARM is the smallest fish in the pond, it can't pay for the best engineers. The best chip engineers will go to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, and startups. ARM is where these companies go to poach.