What you need to know
- Qualcomm announced its FY Q2 2024 financial earnings.
- The company’s revenues were slightly up year over year, while net income was up by 37%.
- Qualcomm has been expanding its presence in the PC market while readying new smartphone chips with its new Oryon cores.
Qualcomm started off the month by posting its fiscal year Q2 2024 financial earnings on Wednesday. While revenue was relatively flat, the company reported $9.39 billion in revenue for the quarter, an increase of 1% over the same quarter in 2023.
Qualcomm’s headset business, which makes up most of its overall revenue, also saw a 1% increase during the quarter, reaching $8.03 billion. While this may not seem like a large gain, it signals healthy growth in the smartphone industry after a bit of a slump just a year ago. By comparison, Qualcomm’s FY Q2 2023 earnings revealed a 17% drop in headset and overall revenue, so the recent numbers are encouraging.
“We are excited about our continued growth and diversification, including achieving our third consecutive quarter of record QCT Automotive revenues, upcoming launches with our Snapdragon X platforms, and enabling leading on-device AI capabilities across multiple product categories,” says Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon in a statement.
During the quarter, Samsung launched the Galaxy S24 series, which is powered by Qualcomm’s latest chipset. While Qualcomm no longer has global share with Samsung’s flagships, Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala also highlighted the company’s strong presence in the Chinese market, which includes new devices from companies like OPPO and Xiaomi.
“We saw year over year handset revenues from our Chinese OEM increased by greater than 40% in the first half of fiscal ’24, reflecting our strong competitive positioning and recovery of demand,” Palkhiwala said during the earnings call.
Amon adds that Qualcomm has “not seen signs of weakness in the Android premium market in China, especially with our OEMs, so a lot of strength really coming from premium devices from Xiaomi or OPPO, OnePlus, Vivo.”
Qualcomm also notes that while its FY Q3 expects to see seasonal dips given the lack of major hardware launches, it looks forward to the launch of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 later this year, which will feature the company’s new Oryon CPU cores. Qualcomm is also looking to the launch of new AI PCs powered by the Snapdragon X Elite chip, which promises to compete with the likes of Apple’s M-series chips.
As with the current batch of phone chipsets, Qualcomm is betting big on AI, which it expects will enable more use cases in various devices, be they phones, PCs, or cars. The company highlights its AI hub for developers to help drive this adoption.
“I want to step back and say, in general, I think AI is going to benefit all the devices,” Amon says. “I think AI, when extends to running on-deviceâbesides the benefit of working alongside the cloudâthey have completely new use cases privacy, security, latency cost, personalization, etc.”
“It’s an exciting tailwind, I think, for our strategy of actually driving computing and connectivity at the edge.”