On February 2, us time, Qualcomm, a mobile chip manufacturer, announced its first quarter results for fiscal year 2022 as of December 26, 2021.
According to the financial report, Qualcomm’s revenue and profit in the first quarter outperformed market expectations, with revenue increasing by 30% year-on-year to US $10.7 billion and market expectations of US $10.44 billion; Net profit increased by 38% year-on-year to US $3.4 billion, with adjusted earnings per share of US $3.23 and market expectation of US $3.
Qualcomm’s main business consists of Qualcomm semiconductor business (QCT), which focuses on chips, and Qualcomm Technology licensing business (QTL), which is responsible for intellectual property licensing. In the first fiscal quarter, Qualcomm’s QCT business revenue was $8.85 billion, a year-on-year increase of 35%, but the growth rate was lower than 63% in the same period last year; QTL business revenue was US $1.81 billion, a year-on-year increase of 10%. Revenue from other businesses including investment division (QSI) was US $1.9 billion.
In QCT business, the revenue of each sub segment continued to grow. Among them, Qualcomm’s mobile phone chip business achieved a revenue of $5.98 billion in the first quarter, a year-on-year increase of 42%. Qualcomm has achieved some success in diversifying its business in recent years: the revenue of RF front-end business was US $1.13 billion, a year-on-year increase of 7%; The revenue of Internet of things business was US $1.48 billion, a year-on-year increase of 41%; The revenue of vehicle business was US $256 million, a year-on-year increase of 21%.
The growth of Qualcomm mobile phone chip shipments means that the demand for smart phones is still high. According to the IDC report, the global smartphone market increased by nearly 6% in 2021, and the shipment volume of smartphones reached 1.35 billion. “Our demand for all technologies remains strong and continues to exceed supply (capacity),” Qualcomm CEO Amun said on an analyst conference call He stressed that the supply shortage was improving, but the bottleneck was expected to persist.
According to Gartner’s preliminary research results, the semiconductor shortage and covid-19 epidemic disrupted the normal production of global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in 2021, but the chip expenditure of the top ten OEM buyers soared by 25.2%, accounting for 42.1% of the whole market. “Semiconductor suppliers shipped more chips in 2021, but OEM demand far exceeded the supplier’s capacity,” said masatsune Yamaji, research director of Gartner
Qualcomm has taken various measures to solve supply chain problems. In addition to cooperating with TSMC and Samsung in advanced processes, Qualcomm also cooperates with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation(688981) and other wafer factories in mature processes. Qualcomm also redesigned some products for different wafer factories to grasp the available capacity as much as possible. In addition, Qualcomm also supports Fabs in the investment required for new equipment and expansion.
However, the Android mobile phone camp led by Qualcomm still needs to compete fiercely with apple, and the Chinese market is the most critical. However, according to the data of Research Institute counterpoint, Apple’s smartphone shipments in China in the fourth quarter increased by 32% year-on-year to 50 million, becoming the champion of smartphone sales.
Qualcomm expects revenue in the second quarter to be in the range of $10.2 billion to $11 billion, and the market is expected to be $9.59 billion; The adjusted earnings per share is in the range of $2.8 to $3, and the market is expected to be $2.48. Due to the shortage of semiconductors, major semiconductor companies have issued optimistic performance guidelines. When amd released its financial report this week, it is expected that the data center business will continue to grow in 2022 and become the main driver of revenue growth.
Although Qualcomm’s first quarter revenue and second quarter performance outlook exceeded analysts’ expectations, the collapse caused by the poor fourth quarter earnings of meta on the same day affected market sentiment and dragged down Qualcomm’s US stocks from an increase of 4.34% to a decline of 8.50%.
