Raspberry Pi Is Planning a London IPO, But Its CEO Expects 'No Change' In Focus (arstechnica.com) 40
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi's not-for-profit side expand by "at least a factor of 2X." And while it's "an understandable thing" that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, "while I'm involved in running the thing, I don't expect people to see any change in how we do things." CEO Eben Upton confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg News that Raspberry Pi had appointed bankers at London firms Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare for "when the IPO market reopens."
Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment. Upton denied or didn't quite deny IPO rumors in 2021, and Bloomberg reported Raspberry Pi was considering an IPO in early 2022. After ARM took a minority stake in the company in November 2023, Raspberry Pi was valued at roughly 400 million pounds, or just over $500 million. Given the company's gradual recovery from pandemic supply chain shortages, and the success of the Raspberry Pi 5 launch, the company's IPO will likely jump above that level, even with a listing in the UK rather than the more typical US IPO. Upton told The Register that "the business is in a much better place than it was last time we looked at it [an IPO]. We partly stopped because the markets got bad. And we partly stopped because our business became unpredictable." "It's a good thing, in that people care about us," Upton said in response to concerned hobbyists and tech enthusiasts. "What Raspberry Pi [builds] are the products we want to buy, and then we sell them to people like us," Upton said. "Certainly, while I'm involved in it, I can't imagine an environment in which the hobbyists are not going to be incredibly important."
The IPO is "about the foundation," Upton said, with that charitable arm selling some of its majority stake in the business entity to raise funds and expand. "We've not cooked up some new way for a not-for-profit to do an IPO, no," he noted. [He told Ars that Raspberry Pi's business arm has had both strategic and private investors in its history, along with a majority shareholder in its Foundation (which in 2016 owned 75 percent of shares), and that he doesn't see changes to what Pi has built. He also noted that the foundation was previously funded by dividends from the business side.]
"We do this transaction, and the proceeds of that transaction allow the foundation to train teachers, run clubs, expand programs, and ... do those things at, at least, a factor of 2X. That's what I'm most excited about." Upton said there would be "no change" to the kinds of products Pi makes, and that makers are "culturally important to us." [...] "If people think that an IPO means we're going to ... push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching," he said. "Let's look at it in 15, 20 years' time."
Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment. Upton denied or didn't quite deny IPO rumors in 2021, and Bloomberg reported Raspberry Pi was considering an IPO in early 2022. After ARM took a minority stake in the company in November 2023, Raspberry Pi was valued at roughly 400 million pounds, or just over $500 million. Given the company's gradual recovery from pandemic supply chain shortages, and the success of the Raspberry Pi 5 launch, the company's IPO will likely jump above that level, even with a listing in the UK rather than the more typical US IPO. Upton told The Register that "the business is in a much better place than it was last time we looked at it [an IPO]. We partly stopped because the markets got bad. And we partly stopped because our business became unpredictable." "It's a good thing, in that people care about us," Upton said in response to concerned hobbyists and tech enthusiasts. "What Raspberry Pi [builds] are the products we want to buy, and then we sell them to people like us," Upton said. "Certainly, while I'm involved in it, I can't imagine an environment in which the hobbyists are not going to be incredibly important."
The IPO is "about the foundation," Upton said, with that charitable arm selling some of its majority stake in the business entity to raise funds and expand. "We've not cooked up some new way for a not-for-profit to do an IPO, no," he noted. [He told Ars that Raspberry Pi's business arm has had both strategic and private investors in its history, along with a majority shareholder in its Foundation (which in 2016 owned 75 percent of shares), and that he doesn't see changes to what Pi has built. He also noted that the foundation was previously funded by dividends from the business side.]
"We do this transaction, and the proceeds of that transaction allow the foundation to train teachers, run clubs, expand programs, and ... do those things at, at least, a factor of 2X. That's what I'm most excited about." Upton said there would be "no change" to the kinds of products Pi makes, and that makers are "culturally important to us." [...] "If people think that an IPO means we're going to ... push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching," he said. "Let's look at it in 15, 20 years' time."
Goodbye, Raspberry Pi (Score:5, Insightful)
No CEO can guarantee focus won't shift with an IPO. Once you are beholden to the investors, they'll start asking why you can't charge the same amount for a Raspberry Pi you can for a full-fledged laptop, some moron will say, "Look, we're leaving money on the table!" and the shortages that lead to $250 boards with a retail of $35 seem like a brief joke.
I kid, sorta. The problem with IPOs is that you can't flat-out filter out bad actors up-front. You can only find them once the money is sunk and the hooks are in. It's like inviting a vampire to dinner, then being shocked when they drain you and your family before you get your first bite.
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They already ditched the low-cost market for compute modules and other business demands for a few years.
Meanwhile RISC-V arrived with strong Debian support and an open platform.
At least we can say they are honestly focusing on their market instead of pretending to be about education.
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Remember when they discontinued the 1GB Raspberry Pi 4, and then lowered the price of the 2GB to $35 to take its place? And then a year or so later, re-introduced the 1GB and pushed the 2GB back up in price?
Yeah, they would never raise prices.
Re:Goodbye, Raspberry Pi (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Goodbye, Raspberry Pi (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps they have sorted out their supply issues but as a home customer I wasn't impressed by cartel like behaviour trading in Unobtanium. I looked at buying a Rpi4 as a SFF desktop a while back - when the only suppliers that had stock in my country were selling ridiculously overpriced 'kit' with crappy mouse and keyboard at an enormous international markup. the bang for buck wasn't in the same ballpark - I ended up getting a used ThinkCentre Tiny from a reputable seller off ebay instead.
At the low end, I've been following DietPi/Armbian threads and have confidence things are rapidly progressing on mainline Linux and U-boot for those $US20 H618 boards - can order them online without the local supplier middleman markup.
At the high end ($$$$), my colleague swears by his RK3588, which he claims spec wise still crushes the Pi 5.
Re:Goodbye, Raspberry Pi (Score:4)
Came here to find out if their focus is currently on delivering maximal shareholder value for the next quarter and turning one-time sales into perpetual subscriptions. If not, it's going to change.
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IMHO, when a company goes public, pretty much innovation stops these days. Shareholders will threaten to sue if a company decides to focus on long term stuff and charge off profits, and anything outstanding the company has done either gets killed or fades to mediocrity.
The problem is that Raspberry Pi may do okay with industrial boards, but those super-cheap RISC-V boards coming from China are improving with leaps and bounds, even with backlevel Linux kernels and software. Eventually, there will be some p
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All stories which make up "Enshittification" can trace their origins back to an IPO.
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All stories which make up "Enshittification" can trace their origins back to an IPO.
While that's probably true, we should really come up with a less crass classifier for such garbage. How about "investorvication?"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They already seem to have shifted their focus away from the original plan. The original Pi model A launched at £20 ($35). The Pi 5 cheapest model is 3x that price.
Okay, inflation, but it's not tripled the price of things since 2011. The basic concept of a cheap but decently powerful computer that can be used for hobby projects and for kids to experiment with has been ditched.
RPI is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you go public, enshitification begins in earnest.
It's been fun though!
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Re:RPI is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
What RPi had going for it was the community, the HAT makers, and so on. Now that the RISC-V people have boards that work with RPi HATs, and that a lot of the community has moved to OrangePis, BananaPis, and other makes, Raspberry Pi needs to focus on rebuilding that community. Otherwise, if they just sell boards to industry, they are going to be easily undercut by the competition. The ASUS Tinker Board 3N PLUS [asus.com] runs rings around a Rpi 5.
Don't forget what waits in the wings by Intel. Intel x86S [intel.com] is something that if Intel does go forward with, it will give ARM and RISC-V a run for its money. SBCs with this architecture will pretty much make RPi boards irrelevant.
Raspberry Pi, as a company needs to start wooing the developers and hobbyists back, otherwise they are going to wind up suffering the same exact fate as SGI... made irrelevant by commodity hardware that is cheaper and developed faster.
CEO (Score:3)
Either the CEO is lying, or stupid if he believes going public won't affect focus.
Re: CEO (Score:3, Informative)
The focus shifted a few years ago when money was to be made and they sold tons of inventory to primarily scalpers over actual education and hobby customers. It was cheaper and more profitable to sell a box of 100 than ship 100 to kids homes when the government forced them away from schools.
That's a shame (Score:2)
They'll shit it up no matter what promises they make today. You can take that to the bank and cash it.
Thank you, open source community! (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for your tireless efforts to make the raspberry pi such a popular and well supported platform! Now that the open source community has done so much of the work for us we plan to capitalize on your efforts and leave you in the gutter. You should have gotten a clue during the parts shortages when we prioritized commercial vendors over getting hardware into the hands of the enthusiasts that made us what we are today.
See you around, schmucks!
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I've moved on to ESP32 platforms for my integration hacking. They are readily available with reliable supply.
Not the compute grunt of a Pi, but it's the I/O that's important.
To remain relevant, Pi needs to maintain ubiquity. Without that the upstream technical effort is shifting.
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If you want compute grunt, RISC-V is starting to get there. China is cranking out new boards all the time, with a lot of I/O choices. I saw a recent SBC with 32 gigs of RAM onboard, and wouldn't be surprised to see 64-128 gigs of RAM this year.
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I pretty much don't need compute grunt. DACs, ADCs, GPIOs and networking are what are useful. The code is drivers and decision logic. The grunt of these little boards is enough and they allow bare metal C programming or micropython/circuitpython for quick and easy stuff.
Raspberry Pi Discards their Fanbase (Score:1)
This should be illegal (Score:2)
Full stop.
--
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. (Alan Turing)
Re: This should be illegal (Score:1)
Fuck Upton, Altman, all the shameless chancers.
Raspberries go to the bottom of the spec list.
Shareholders (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Hmm, sure (Score:1)
The piâ(TM)s werenâ(TM)t available because the company shipped to businesses first, mostly resellers who packaged it up and sold them on eBay and Amazon as a kit for 3x the retail price.
i’m sure nothing will change (Score:2)
and if you believe that, then may i interest you in a bridge or trickle-down economics?
IPO == you are cashing out. we have been through this before. saying nothing will change when all the while giving up control? yeaaaah, riiiiiiiiiight. have fun chasing dollars. idiots.
Re:I'm sure nothing will change (Score:1)
100% this.
Look at Unity for a recent example of what happens post IPO.
Y'all are seriously underestimating this guy (Score:1)
Just recently, when halfway through Learning Computer Architecture with Raspberry Pi, I was struck by the notion that Eben Upton, for all his calm and considerate demeanour, might well be a man of Napoleon-rivalling ambition. His long-game business model is not cheap open-board computers, it is chip design. At an early stage in his career, he set his long-term goals according to the, I believe quite correct, observation that the art of chip design was (and is) still in its infancy, that the ARM all-IP-and-z
"no change": Wrong (Score:2)
If market capitalisation doesn't increase by 10 percent, there will be a change of CEO. Then, all his words "will be lost in time like tears in rain."
Like all public corporations, reducing product support, reducing R&D, reducing product mix, increasing product price, increasing earnings/share will be the priority.
Your call is important to us (Score:2)
I can't imagine an environment in which the hobbyists are not going to be incredibly important."
Important for developing much of the software that made the Pi range the market success it is.
But not important enough to support when supplies dry up and there is money to be made from industrial / commercial sales
Right (Score:3)
Uh huh. That is why all the production went to commercial users, and Pi's became unobtanium, or if you could find one, it was like dealing with a scalper outside a stadium.
After searching, and not wanting to buy one of the silly bundled "kits" at a crazy price, I bought a Le Potato, which is similar to the Pi, only hella less expensive.
I suspect that after ignoring and abandoning their original base, and that base looking elsewhere for low powered computers, they might be a tad worried. Their new base is business, not the experimenter.
Upton is a lying sack of shit (Score:1)
"If people think that an IPO means we're going to push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching," he said. "Let's look at it in 15, 20 years' time." https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]
That is not, "No, we are not going to push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets." You did not deny any of that would happen.
Yup, lying sack
And the avalanche has started (Score:2)
It was a fun ride while it lasted.