ARM's financials go up and down

LITTLE BRITISH CHIPPIE, ARM has posted its financial results for the first quarter of 2009, and managed to befuddle us by posting a 10 per cent drop in revenue (when measured in dollars) but an 18 per cent increase in revenue when counted in pounds sterling.

ARM said it had pulled in $120.9 million in sales year-on-year, but this represented a 10 per cent slump due to the strengthening of the dollar against the squid. In good old English currency, the firm boasted its revenue as £79.9 million, an 18 per cent revenue boost. Yes, we scratched our heads and fiddled about with the calculator trying to make sense of that, to no avail, too.

Unsurprisingly, given the economic climate, ARM didn't quite live up to analyst expectations, with pre-tax profits of just £23.9 million, but ARM's CEO, Warren East said his firm had done well to outperform the semiconductor industry which, as a whole, declined some 30 per cent in the first quarter.
 
"Leading semiconductor and OEM companies are continuing to utilise ARM technology," said East adding that this fostered, "healthy demand for our latest processors and physical IP products."

Overall in Q1 '09, ARM earned $40.7 million in licence revenue, down 15 per cent, year on year. Of that cash, $31.9 million heralded from ARM's processor division and $8.8 million came from its Physical IP group. The British chip firm also earned some $58.3 million in royalty revenues during the first quarter, down by nine per cent. ARM added it had signed 17 processor licences in the first quarter including five for Mali graphics processor and four for the Cortex-M for microcontrollers.

East stopped short of revising the firm's earlier predictions for the rest of 2009, but stressed that the forecasts were highly dependent on the economic situation and could be completely different if "industry conditions deteriorate to a greater extent than is generally anticipated."

ARM has so far bucked the recession trend in that it has not layed off masses of employees in order to save a bit of pocket change. ARM's current workforce stands at 1,729 full-time staff, a net reduction of just 11 since the year end.

Click here for a PDF of the full results. µ