Automotive drives strong Q4, fiscal year for Qualcomm

At CES in January, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon predicted that the automotive industry could be the next computing space offering the opportunity for the company to hit the accelerator on providing bedrock technology for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven and connected devices in that sector, and for other use cases such as the internet of things (IoT) and Industry 4.0. This prediction looks to have borne fruit for the company in the fourth quarter of the company’s financial year, driving robust year-on-year revenue growth.

For the quarter ended 29 September 2024, Qualcomm reported total revenues of $10.244bn, a 19% increase compared with the same period of 2023, driving earnings before taxes of $2.597bn, soaring 83% year-on-year. Net income virtually doubled in 12 months to $2.92bn.

Drilling deeper into the quarterly results, Qualcomm revealed that for its core QCT semiconductor division, revenues were $8.2bn, at the high end of its guidance range with combined automotive and IoT revenues totalling $2.6bn.

Handset business brought in $6.1bn in Q4, with the company boasting strong design traction, with successful launches at Xiaomi, Honor, Oppo and Vivo. It’s set for additional launches at Samsung and ASUS among others.

IoT revenues amounted to $1.7bn, with PC original equipment manufacturers, including Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Acer and ASUS, offering devices powered by the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core platform. Qualcomm currently has 58 platforms launched or in development across the X Series portfolio.

At $899m, automotive revenues alone were 68% higher than for the same period in 2023. Leading car manufacturers including Li Auto, BMW and Mercedes-Benz have adopted Snapdragon Elite automotive platforms for their future software-defined vehicles.

The Qualcomm Technology Licensing Division saw revenues of $1.5bn, also at the high end of previous guidance.

For the fiscal year, Qualcomm saw revenues rise 9% on an annual basis to $38.962bn, with EBT climbing 39% year-on-year to $10.336bn. Net income saw an almost identical strong lift to total $10.142bn.

“We are pleased to conclude the fiscal year with strong results in the fourth quarter, delivering greater than 30% year-over-year growth in EPS,” said Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm. “We are excited about our recent product announcements … as they continue to extend our technology leadership and position us well across handsets, PC, automotive and industrial IoT.”

At the recent Snapdragon Summit, the company launched the Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform, which Qualcomm said offers the world’s fastest mobile CPU and is the “the most powerful and world’s fastest” mobile system-on-a-chip.

It offers technologies such as the second-generation custom-built Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU and enhanced Hexagon NPU, all of which, said Qualcomm, deliver “game-changing” performance improvements. These include personalised, multi-modal on-device generative AI, enabling the understanding of speech, context and images to enhance use cases such as business productivity.