British chip design maker Arm plans to develop a chip that will showcase the company’s knowledge and capabilities. The chip is not sold directly, but has to attract new customers.

According to the Financial Times newspaper, Arm assembled a new engineering team led by former Qualcomm CEO Kevork Kechichian. Six months ago, this team would have been tasked with designing the “most advanced” prototype for smartphone and laptop chips. Arm does not want to reveal technical details yet.

The prototype will also never go on sale or be offered through licensing. The British chip design maker just wants to show what it can do to win over new customers. With over 500 companies including big names like Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek licensed from Arm, it’s tempting to think that this isn’t the company’s primary concern, but there’s still cause for concern.

Arm’s top twenty customers account for 86 percent of total sales. The company therefore wants to broaden its customer base in order to be less dependent on the few big fish. Arm primarily wants to work his way into the PC industry. Apple’s M chips are based on the ARM architecture, but the company’s technology is still a rarity within the Windows landscape.

Warm up for the stock market

The prototype chip is also intended to serve as a teaser for the upcoming IPO. Arm wants to maximize his income as much as possible in order to increase the company’s market value to at least $50 billion. To do this, she would also look for a new license model in which the price of the licenses is calculated according to the value of the device. This would allow Arm to charge higher prices for its technology.

The IPO is scheduled to take place later this year. The parent company SoftBank, which has been trying to sell the British subsidiary for some time, hopes to collect eight billion dollars immediately with the sale of the Arm shares.