Qualcomm forecasts $1B in sales from IoT, smart wearables chips
According to Reuters, the company says that sales of IoT chips will represent about one fifth of the $5 billion in revenue that the chipmaker believes it will make outside the mobile phone market. This comes following the company’s failed $44 billion bid to buy NXP Semiconductors, which was seen as a diversifying move away from the phone market into higher growth areas.
NXP is a leading supplier to the automotive market, which is seeing accelerating use of electronics as carmakers push for increasingly connected and autonomous vehicles. Qualcomm’s deal to buy NXP was quashed last month when it failed to be approved by Chinese regulators.
As far as IoT and smart wearable devices, the company says its chips are now in more than 200 kinds of wearables and 1,300 different wireless headsets, earbuds, and wireless speakers. In addition, it expects about 120% revenue growth in SoC chipsets for connected cameras in fiscal 2018 versus the prior year, noting that major camera brands have selected Qualcomm devices for their image quality and support for on-device AI.
“We are committed to providing innovative technologies to help expand the IoT ecosystem,” says Cristiano Amon, president, Qualcomm Incorporated. “We are looking to make it easier for companies of all sizes to succeed in designing and commercializing innovative IoT solutions and to participate in this huge opportunity.”
In the industrial IoT market – including enterprise, manufacturing, retail, supply chain, and utilities – the company’s modems and SoCs are being used for connectivity and edge processing for products such as point-of-sale terminals and industrial handhelds. In smart homes, the company’s products are seeing use in mesh Wi-Fi and 11ax solutions, and the company says it expects four-fold revenue increases in SoC chipsets from the Home Entertainment segment in fiscal 2018 versus a year ago.
“This strength in home connectivity, coupled with recent product introductions featuring edge computing, on-device artificial intelligence (AI), and voice control,” says the company, “is designed to help the Company grow its footprint in connected and smart home devices such as appliances, lighting, and more recently smart displays including an award-winning product launch from Lenovo.”
The company’s $5 billion in projected non-mobile chip sales number represents a $2 billion increase over last year. Other components making up that expected revenue number will come from networking chips, the company’s own automotive chips, and a few other areas, the company says.
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