Raspberry Pi Holdings PLC (LSE:RPI) delivers its maiden full-year results as a listed company on Wednesday, 2 April.
In its last update, in January, the UK DIY-computing outfit said it was expecting demand to "build gradually" through the coming year with its market described as "challenging" currently but the medium-term outlook felt to be "extremely positive".
The company reported it had shipped 7 million units of its single-board computers and compute modules in 2024 and expects to report underlying profit (adjusted EBITDA) of at least $36 million.
Raspberry Pi had $45 million of cash at the end of December.
Ahead of the results, analysts at Jefferies tempered near-term expectations while flagging potential upside from edge AI – eventually.
The bank downgraded the stock to 'hold' from 'buy' in a note last month, "pending visibility of recovery", but raised its price target to 770p from 448p.
Analysts said they felt lower unit volumes are hitting 2024 and 2025 numbers, but the long-term story – involving "edge AI" and DeepSeek’s low-cost inferencing models – is still intact.
The earnings outlook for 2025 will be in focus, and Jefferies is forecasting sales of $291 million and adjusted EBITDA of $42.4 million off the back of continued destocking, which they think makes 2025 more of a "transition year".
On the long-term, the Jefferies team highlighted DeepSeek’s training methods using reinforcement learning and distillation, which "makes such industry models more accessible and affordable".
"DeepSeek's approach has brought [edge AI] eventuality closer in our opinion… many of which could be run off local networks and on devices, with limited compute and memory requirements."
Raspberry Pi’s edge AI hardware, including the Pi 5 and CM5 boards with support for AI accelerators and frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow, is seen as well-positioned.
"We expect edge AI to gradually start becoming a driver of sales from 2026 onwards."
In the meantime, it's mostly a waiting game.