ARM Community: Investor Relations - ARM Community

On Wednesday 26th October ARM hosted an investor day in Santa Clara, California. The event, which was hosted with Goldman Sachs, coincided with ARM’s annual technology conference (TechCon). Investors and analysts attended Key Note addresses from thought-leading companies in the ARM ecosystem such as Oracle, Microsoft and Avnet. They also enjoyed an ARM-guided tour of TechCon, and were treated to five investor Q&A sessions with ARM executives and key ARM Partners.

During the three days of TechCon there were a number of important announcements, both from ARM and from ARM’s partners. This included the release of ARM’s v8 architecture, which for the first time...

ARM’s opportunity to grow royalty revenue over the next five years is driven by multiple markets that are growing structurally and where we may also gain share. This blog is one five where we examine each of these key markets.

Here we interview Lakshmi Mandyam, Director of Enterprise Segment Marketing at ARM to discuss the impact of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) growth for ARM. This post is one of.

Hi Lakshmi, how did ARM originally get into the HDD market?
Hi Jonathan, ARM identified hard disk drives as an opportunity for growth in the late 1990’s. At this time the controller chips in enterprise hard drives were struggling to cope with larger, denser disks and the requirement to read data ever faster from the disk. OEMs were struggling with the R&D burden of having to support multiple proprietary architectures across the full range of their product platforms. ARM addressed this problem by working closely with the leading HDD OEMs and semiconductor companies to identify how we could develop a family of processors that could address their specific needs and leverage ARM’s breadth of silicon partners and software partners.

We realised that the key to solving their challenges was in addressing their product development needs beyond just the processor to understand their technical and business challenges. We needed technology to support the software engineers writing the HDD-specific algorithms and c...

Over the next five years, ARM’s opportunity to grow royalty revenue is driven by multiple markets that are growing structurally and where we may also gain share. This post is one of five where we look at each of these drivers.

In this blog we interview Laurence Bryant, Director of Mobile Segment Marketing at ARM to discuss the impact of smartphone growth.

Hi Laurence, smartphones have really taken off over the last few years, how fast is this market growing and can that growth really be sustained?
In the mobile phone market consumers are increasingly choosing smartphones rather than voice-only or feature phones. Consumers are choosing to purchase smartphones due to the greater user experience that can be customised to the services that they are personally interested. The greater the performance and functionality the more the consumers are using their mobile phones and the more they become their primary compute platform. According to industry analysts the smartphone market grew by over 50% in 2010 and most analysts expect similar levels of growth this year. A recent report from iSuppli, suggests that by 2015 more than half of all mobile phone shipments will be smartphones, which would suggest a compound annual gro...

In our Q2 2011 results, ARM reported Q2 processor licensing revenues at $58 million, the third successive quarter with license revenue over $50 million. Investors have been questioning whether this level of license revenue is sustainable, or whether there were some temporary effects over the last few quarters.

Before I address these questions, here are few remarks for readers that are not familiar with ARM’s business model and how we recognise license revenue.

Introduction
ARM generates its processor license revenues from the sale of processor designs. These revenues are fees that semiconductor companies pay to gain access to the design of a processor. Typically these are either:
Product licenses: One-off fees paid to gain access to a specific processor product, with defined usage rights. Subscription licenses: On-going fees paid to have access to a family of product designs, which can include products that are still in development. A subscription license will be for a fixed number of years.In addition to license revenues, ARM also receives a royalty on every chip shipped containing ARM technology, and we sell software tools and services. We will discuss these other rev...

ARM held its annual analyst and investor day on 17 May 2011.

A link to the full presentation and webcast is here, and a brief overview is below.


ARM has the Best Technology

ARM processors are designed to be highly efficient, delivering high-performance within a limited power budget. Getting the power and performance balance right has been the key to ARM’s success in mobile phones and computers, and has become just as important in other applications from sensors to servers.

Three key takeaways:
ARM processors are being designed into applications that range from a glaucoma sensor no bigger than 1mm3 (to fit inside a human eye) to a neutrino detector over 1km3 in sizeBy December 2010, ARM had tap...