What it’s worthwhile to know
- Qualcomm introduced a document $11.67 billion income within the first fiscal-year quarter of 2025.
- The biggest YoY enhance got here from automotive (61%), although handsets (13%) was the biggest income supply at $7.57 billion.
- Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon targeted on “rising edge AI alternative” demonstrated by DeepSeek AI.
- Arm has withdrawn its resolution to terminate the Qualcomm structure license settlement, preserving the latter’s capacity to promote customized Oryon CPUs.
Qualcomm opened the 2025 fiscal 12 months with its strongest income quarter within the firm’s historical past, hitting $11.67 billion totally on the power of the Snapdragon 8 Elite and its “long-standing strategic partnerships with Samsung and Google.”
However the firm additionally warned that the following quarter is likely to be “flat” at greatest, partly due to sturdy Apple iPhone gross sales.
CEO Cristiano Amon headlined Qualcomm’s Q1FY25 earnings name, saying that the corporate’s “quarterly income data” replicate “the power of our know-how, product roadmap, and end-customer demand.”
A 13% development in handset income got here from “stronger client demand for just lately launched flagship smartphones and international share in Samsung Galaxy S25 gadgets,” stated Qualcomm COO Akash Palkhiwala.
After touting the success of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Amon targeted on the brand new Snapdragon X for mini-desktop PCs, in addition to Qualcomm’s dominance within the XR area as the first accomplice for Meta Quest headsets, Ray-Ban sensible glasses, and upcoming Android XR headsets like Samsung’s Venture Moohan.
“We stay optimistic that we’re firstly of an inflection level for sensible glasses to achieve scale,” Amon stated, which traces up with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s feedback throughout his latest earnings name that he hopes to see “tons of of thousands and thousands, and ultimately billions of AI glasses.”
Simply as Qualcomm noticed a 68% automotive revenue development within the final quarterly earnings, they noticed one other 61% enhance for this quarter, as much as $961 million — whereas IoT grew 36% to $1.5 billion. Qualcomm introduced an Amazon partnership at CES 2025 to create “LLM-powered experiences within the automotive,” and its Snapdragon Cockpit Elite has obtained a “sturdy trade response,” Amon claims.
Amon predicts the corporate will earn $22 billion on “non-handset income by 2029,” in comparison with about $8 billion complete in 2024. This implies that edge AI and XR enterprise will develop on an exponential scale, making Qualcomm much less dependent upon the smartphone enterprise alone.
Amon explicitly referenced the latest, surprising DeepSeek AI demo as proof that “AI fashions are growing quicker, changing into smaller, extra succesful and environment friendly, and now capable of run immediately” on Snapdragon-powered tech, with Microsoft bringing “NPU-optimized variations of DeepSeek R1” to Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs.
Within the shorter time period, Qualcomm’s executives warned that Q2FY2025 — or January by March 2025 — will see a “decline in QCT handset revenues” from $10 billion to as little as $8.9 billion. The primary trigger might be “seasonality and shipments to Apple,” which makes its personal customized chips.
Apple just lately reported a 4% YoY development in its earnings name final week, and is evidently anticipated to see even stronger iPhone 16 sequence gross sales subsequent quarter whereas Android telephone flagship gross sales could decline.
On the very least, Qualcomm can proceed to make earnings regardless of Arm’s efforts to ban Qualcomm’s chips final 12 months. Amon reported that “Arm just lately notified us that it was withdrawing its October 22, 2024 discover of breach, and indicated that it has no present plan to terminate the Qualcomm structure license settlement.” If Arm hadn’t misplaced its latest authorized battle, future Qualcomm earnings would have been considerably deflated.
