ARM Holdings (LSE: ARM, NASDAQ: ARMH), announced its unaudited financial results for the third quarter and nine months ended 30 September 2009. In the statement ARM revealed it has continued to outperform the semiconductor industry and gain market share, the two percent decrease in like-for-like profit remains in-line with previous guidance.
ARM Holdings is a major international supplier of intellectual property in the semiconductor industry. ARM provides developers with intellectual property (IP) solutions in the form of processors, physical IP, cache and SoC (System on Chip) designs, application-specific standard products (ASSPs), related software and development tools.
Despite the 2% decline in normalised profits verses 2008, in the period ARM made considerable progress in a challenging environment, increasing revenues (in GBP) by 5% and also improved operating margins to 31.7%. The company’s growth has been led by growth in its technologies for mobile computers, smartphones and other mobile devices.
During the period ARM signed 13 new processor licenses signed for high-performance mobile computers and smartphones, including a ‘2GHz dual Cortex-A9 processor for mobile computing applications’.
In its other semiconductor businesses ARM signed 15 new processor licenses, including four next-gen processors, for a broad range of markets including digital TV, microcontrollers, hard disk drives and networking applications.
According to ARM, they have achieved strong sequential growth in all target markets including 75% sequential increase in shipments of ARM-technology based microcontrollers due to market share gains and inventory restocking.
In today’s statement ARM also said it was encouraged by the improving confidence among its customer base and it reiterated guidance that it expects group dollar revenues for the full year to be at least in line with current market expectations.
ARM Holding CEO, Warren East commented on the Group’s performance:
“Q3 was a good quarter for ARM. Despite pressure on customers' R&D budgets we are pleased that continuing strong demand from industry leaders combined with our broadest range of products and effective use of licensing models, has delivered a record number of processor licenses.”