Qualcomm celebrated Christmas with a 40 per cent sales boost

CHIP DESIGNER Qualcomm has announced profits of $1.4bn showing rival system-on-chip (SoC) designers that there are big bucks in smartphones.

Qualcomm's results follow hot on the heels of ARM's, the firm that licenses its architecture to Qualcomm. Like the British chip designer, Qualcomm enjoyed a bumper three months leading up to Christmas 2012. Qualcomm's first quarter of its fiscal 2012 year showed a 40 per cent increase in year on year revenues to $4.68bn, with profits increasing by 20 per cent to $1.4bn.

Although in 2011 Qualcomm faced stiff competition from its traditional rivals such as Texas Instruments and Broadcom, relatively new SoC player Nvidia came in with its Tegra 2 chip, which gained some traction in smartphones and tablets. However Qualcomm's results show that the firm remained relatively unaffected by its rivals' success, and its Snapdragon line of SoCs held up well.

According to Qualcomm it shipped 158 million chips, a 32 per cent increase on the same period last year. That is very impressive, but 2012 will require another step-change as quad-core SoCs become far more common.

Now Qualcomm is prepping its quad-core Krait SoC to take on Nvidia's Tegra 3 chip, with the firm bullish on future sales. Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm said, "We are raising our revenue and earnings guidance as our broad licensing partnerships and extensive chipset roadmap, led by our integrated Snapdragon processors, position us well for strong growth in fiscal 2012."

Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs have shown that they can withstand competition from all comers, but the firm needs to see its Krait chip appear in a number of new devices shown off at Mobile World Congress in order to meet Jacobs' bullish predictions. µ