ARM profits from smartphone and tablet market growth
Pre-tax profits at the British chip architecture firm ARM have gone up by more than a third in the last year, the company reported on Wednesday.
According to ARM's quarterly results, pre-tax profits stood at £50.8m in Q1 2011, with revenues at £116m — a year ago, those figures were £37.6m and £92.3m respectively. According to chief executive Warren East, the 35 percent profit rise coincided with a 33 percent increase in ARM-processor based shipments "driven by growth in smartphones, tablets, digital TVs and microcontrollers".
"Influential market leaders are licensing ARM technology to gain access to a growing ecosystem of operating systems, software applications, tools and service providers," East said in a statement. "Many of these companies have been ARM licensees for many years, and are now deploying ARM technology across a multitude of applications; in mobile, consumer electronics and embedded devices."
The architecture of ARM, a spin-off from Acorn, is found in almost every mobile phone and tablet, due its low power requirements. The company does not make chips itself, but licenses its architecture to other manufacturers such as Samsung and Texas Instruments.
On Tuesday, ARM also announced that LG has become a licensee of its architecture for new Cortex processors and Mali graphics processing units.
According to a statement on Tuesday, LG will use the ARM architecture in its mobile phone, tablet, digital TV, set-top box and smart grid products. The deal covers the Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A9 multicore processors, the Mali-T604 GPU and ARM's CoreLink interconnect and system IP.
"The scalability of ARM processing solutions combined with the software ecosystem will enable smart, open platform systems, and drive connectivity and web enabled interactions," LG vice president Boik Sohn said in the statement. "This new licensing agreement will provide LG with the next generation processor technology that will allow us to maintain leadership in display enabled connected devices, such as smart digital TV's and smart phones, and drive our platform strategy."
LG had licensed ARM's technology since 1995, using it for handsets, digital TVs and other devices.