ARM announces a 19 percent increase in revenues

CHIP DESIGNER ARM has announced a 19 percent increase in fourth quarter 2012 revenues, helping the firm post an impressive £59.5m profit.

ARM's chip designs are licensed by several chip makers including Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments, and the firm has been riding high as its architecture continues to dominate the smartphone and tablet markets. The firm announced fourth quarter 2012 revenues of £164.2m, a 19 percent increase from the previous year, while profits before tax rose to £59.5m, a 16 percent jump.

The firm's full year 2012 financial results were similarly healthy, posting annual revenues of £576.9m, a 17 percent gain from 2011, while profits grew by 20 percent to £221m.

ARM CEO Warren East said, "ARM has seen good revenue and earnings growth throughout 2012. Customers are developing products to meet the needs of the post PC era and are driving demand for ARM's most advanced technology.

"In [the fourth quarter] we again saw influential market leaders demonstrating their commitment to ARM technology by licensing our latest products.

"Royalty revenue has also grown strongly during [quarter four] underpinned by ARM's market share gains and an increased royalty percentage from Cortex A class processors being deployed into smartphones and tablets."

The company said that its various architectures shipped 2.5bn chips during the fourth quarter, while royalty revenues grew 21 percent from the same period a year ago. It said it signed seven new licensees for its Mali GPU, along with 36 licenses for its core CPU architecture.

ARM said it has a record order backlog and that it expects first quarter 2013 revenue to be around the £150m mark. µ