Qualcomm makes chips and licenses their technology to others in order to make money. Simple enough to follow. You may or may not have heard of them, but they’re the folks who do the Snapdragon processor that goes into a lot of high end smartphones such as the Google Nexus One. They also make mid range processors that go into devices such as the HTC Hero, Legend, and many others.
So how have their past 3 months of business gone? Chip sales are up to 103 million, up 10% from the same time last year, and up 11% from last quarter. Profit is up to $767 million compared to $737 million same quarter last year. The company is so confident that 2010 is going to be an awesome year that they’ve increased their expected revenues by $300 million to $10.7 billion.
They also expect to ship between 106 and 111 million chips next quarter compared to 91 million from the same quarter last year. That’s a jump of between 16% and 22%. In other words, all is well. We’re expecting to see the first 1.3 GHz and 1.5 GHz Snapdragon based devices hit the market by the end of this year, and for 2011 to be all about dual core. What are we going to do with that much power in our pants? Do you honestly expect a man to tell you he’s packing too much power near his crotch region?
But seriously, expect mobile processors to get insanly fast, and for Qualcomm’s largest competitors: Texas Instruments, ST-Ericsson and Samsung, to try and catchup or in some cases even surprass what Qualcomm is capable of. Samsung has already said they’re planning a quad core chip for 2012. Battery life? What’s that?
[Via: Associated Press, Qualcomm Investor Relations (PDF)]