While the company, which provides technology for the iPhone among others, saw more design wins in the next generation of smartphones, growth was boosted by rising demand from a broad range of markets including: mobile computing, automotive, networking infrastructure and servers.
Commenting on the company’s results Simon Segars, CEO, said, “Devices are increasingly being improved by first becoming digital, and then smart, and then connected. This generates huge amounts of data that needs to be protected, transmitted, managed and stored across the Internet. This is driving our licencing, as more companies need access to smart processors to build intelligence into more products.”
Processor licensing was up 24 percent year on year, although royalties, paid on the 4.1 billion chips shipped in the previous quarter by ARM's partners, fell slightly short of expectations.
"Our outperformance was driven by market share gains and the increasing amount of ARM technology appearing in the latest mobile devices and other markets," Chief Financial Officer Chris Kennedy. "Nearly three quarters of new microcontrollers, which is the technology that goes into the 'things' of the Internet of Things, are ARM-based."
According to Peter Hutton, President of ARM's Product Group, "Fifty percent of the licences issued in the first quarter have gone to completely new customers, ones that we have never engaged with before. The list is certainly broad and varied, covering everything including: aerospace, IoT, navigation systems and smart watches."
While ARM’s processors and graphics technology is being used by Samsung, Huawei and Apple, the company is looking beyond these traditional markets to the Internet of Things and enterprise servers as a source of future growth – a move welcomed by analysts and market watchers as concerns have been raised over the saturated nature of the smartphone market and the weak sales of devices such as Apple’s iPhone, sales of which seem to have taken a tumble in the first quarter of 2016.
The company said that it had signed 39 processor licences with a broad range of companies in the first quarter and that its more advanced technologies were in strong demand – eight licences were signed for the company’s Cortex-A technology for high-performance and highly efficient application processors while two Mali multimedia processors licences were also signed.
With over 4billion ARM based chips shipped year-on-year sales were ahead 10 percent.
According to the company macroeconomic uncertainty could influence consumer and enterprise spending this year, potentially impacting semiconductor sales, but it was confident that full-year revenues would be in line with market expectations of $1.65 billion.
