Warren East, CEO of ARM Holdings talks about ‘Big’ and what being ‘Big’ being means at the BLN Growth Forum 2011. By any reasonable measure, ARM Holdings is a decent sized UK technology company – arguably the only pure tech company in the FTSE 100.
100. 
ARM is one of the biggest companies in the UK.
Size is a relative thing though. Warren points out that ARM at market cap $11 billion is number 44 in the FSTE 100. Experian in number 43 on $6.3 billion dollars and has more profit than ARM but is has 15,000 employees. WM Morrison at number 45 has over 100,000 employees. By what measure do we measure ‘big’ and ‘small’? It is NOT just about numbers and revenue. We have some world leading companies in the UK, ARM Holdings being an example, being one. How do you measure ‘Big’?
- Brand
- Influence
UPDATE: July 20th 2011.
If you measure ‘big’ on the company you keep, this interview in Fortune with Frank Quattrone shows ARM Holdings in the same bracket as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Qualcomm and Salesforce.
“If you add all that up, those group of companies, which were the standard-bearers of the last generation, are down over 400 billion in market cap. The companies on the rise, Apple, Amazon, Qualcomm, Facebook, ARM and Sales Force, are up about 435.” http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/21/frank-quattrone-vido-transcript-brainstorm/
ARM is everywhere – and typically outperforms its peers by profit growth, margin etc. 
ARM Holdings has a market share of about 28% of all chips in the markets it operates in. The key piece of the puzzle to become BIG for ARM Holdings is partnership and collaboration. they want to be a key piece of the chip jigsaw puzzle and use their brand to punch above their weight.
Here is the ARM Holdings family. ARM works very hard on its industry presence. ARM believes a slice of a very big pie is much better than owning a small pie.
Warren East notes that a lot of the success of a big business is down to luck. You cannot guarantee luck but you can do things to drive luck for the future.