What you need to know
- Qualcomm announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2024.
- The company’s revenue increased slightly year-over-year, while net profit rose 37%.
- Qualcomm has expanded its presence in the PC market while preparing new smartphone chips with its new Oryon cores.
Qualcomm started the month by releasing its second-quarter 2024 financial results on Wednesday. While sales remained relatively flat, the company reported revenue of $9.39 billion for the quarter, up 1% from the same quarter in 2023.
Qualcomm’s headset business, which accounts for most of its total revenue, also saw a 1% increase in the quarter, reaching $8.03 billion. While this may not seem like a huge increase, it does signal healthy growth in the smartphone industry after a slight dip a year ago. In comparison, Qualcomm’s Q2 2023 results showed a 17% decline in headset and overall revenue, so the latest numbers are encouraging.
“We are excited about our continued growth and diversification, including achieving our third consecutive quarter of record sales at QCT Automotive, upcoming launches with our Snapdragon in a statement.
During the quarter, Samsung launched the Galaxy S24 series, equipped with Qualcomm’s latest chipset. While Qualcomm no longer has global market share for 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 experienced a more than 40% year-over-year increase in mobile phone sales from our Chinese OEM in the first half of fiscal 2024, reflecting our strong competitive position and recovery in demand,” Palkhiwala said during the earnings call.
Amon adds that Qualcomm “has seen no signs of weakness in the Android premium market in China, particularly among our OEMs, so a lot of strength really comes from premium devices from Xiaomi or OPPO, OnePlus, Vivo.”
Qualcomm also notes that while it expects seasonal dips in the fiscal third quarter due to the lack of major hardware launches, it is looking forward to the launch of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 later this year, powered by the new Oryon CPU -cores of the company will be equipped. Qualcomm also plans to launch new AI PCs with the Snapdragon X Elite chip, which will compete with Apple’s M-series chips.
As with the current range of phone chipsets, Qualcomm is betting big on AI, which is expected to enable more use cases in different devices, be it phones, PCs or cars. The company is highlighting its AI hub for developers to drive this adoption.
“I want to take a step back and generally say that I think AI will benefit all devices,” says Amon. “I think that AI, when expanded to run on device – alongside the benefits of collaboration with the cloud – offers entirely new use cases in terms of privacy, security, latency costs, personalization, etc.”
“I think this is an exciting tailwind for our strategy to actually advance computing and connectivity at the edge.”