all 4 companies economies show red for 2014.
Well duh. They are not stupid and know that profit is bad financially.
Governments tax profit, they do not tax loss. Better to run up a slight debt (with good interest rate since you are a big company) than pay out tax on profit. You can blow all your profit away on investments which will generate more revenue in the future (and offset the slight debt).
ARM makes a profit because it is a technology investment company. Unlike Intel, AMD and NVidia which design and sell fully functional hardware, ARM only designs and sells parts of hardware. If you are a chip manufacture you go to ARM, ask for some CPU designs for a technology node and they give you all the layout data. You take these designs, place them in your technology node and add designs for peripherals and things around them. The end result is you design a new good performance processor component paying only an ARM licence and not the billions needed to develop a similar processor. Better yet is that programming your processor is like programming another companies processor which also uses ARM, you get the ARM compilers, change some hardware level parts and it works.
Intel, IBM, AMD and NVidia sell complete chips at specific technology nodes. You cannot ask Intel for designs to use in your own chip.
The result is that companies like ARM can be a lot more reactive with their spending than companies like Intel since they can choose what technologies to develop and have no direct manufacturing to worry about. Additionally ARM sells to markets not able to be touched by companies like Intel.
We also cannot rule out ARM's cooperate structure. It could be that share specific large shareholders gain from profit and so force profit so they earn more from the shares.
Just so people know, ARM processors generally perform worse than Intel or AMD processors and definitely perform a lot worse than IBM processors. They are perfect where ultra high performance is not required or where energy efficiency is important (eg a mobile phone) but bad for where performance is required (games console like PS4/XB1). Critical performance applications like bank's automatic trader systems can only use IBM processors as they are the fastest you can get (any other processor will lose you a lot of money). This is why until recently IBM processors were used in games consoles since they just were faster however this practice has changed recently with AMD pushing its PC targeted x86-64 processors into consoles for cost efficiency.
IBM used technologies like multi-core processors, pipe-lining etc long before Intel did. They have and probably always will be the cutting edge of processors.