ARM tops $1bn
The company saw revenues of over $1bn for the first time, up 22% on last year, with 121 new licensees.
Over half the 22 companies that signed licenses with ARM in the last quarter were new customers, with 15 taking the Cortex-M embedded cores. ARM has now signed more than 200 Cortex‐M licences with over 150 companies, making it the largest product line in the company with 30% of unit shipments. Half of the 10bn devices shipped last year were outside of its traditional mobile market as microcontrollers and the Internet of Things starts to take off and its high end smartphone business slows. Embedded now makes up 32% of the business, compared to 46% for mobile.
“ARM saw good progress in Q4 as our latest technology was chosen by major companies in all our target markets, with further licenses signed for our latest ARMv8‐A processors, Mali graphics processors and physical IP technology,” said Simon Seagars, CEO of ARM. “ARM’s Partners reported that they had shipped 2.9 billion ARM‐based chips, a record number despite slower growth of chips for premium smartphones. This takes our cumulative shipments since 1993 to more than 50 billion chips, with over 10 billion reported as shipped in 2013 alone.”
Following the acquisitions of $11.7m acquisition of Finnish IoT software house Sensinode in October, and the $20m (£13.4m) acquisition of Cambridge-based Geomerics leaves the company with a war chest of over $1bn (£716m).
ARM’s 64bit cores are starting slowly with three licensees, one for the architecture and two for the A50 family of cores announced in October 2012.
The fallout from the splitting up of MIPS Technologies last year is also apparent.
ARM has bought the MIPS pool of 498 patents for $4m from the Bridge Crossing consortium, creating a library of 3,500 patents. ARM had originally paid $167m to form the consortium with Allied Security Trust to license the patents to third parties but the consortium decided not to go ahead with that licensing. ARM is now taking a £59.5m charge as a result. Imagination Technologies acquired the remaining 80 patents relating directly to the MIPS processors.
www.arm.com
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