Chip technology firm Arm revenues up 35% to $2.7 bn

SoftBank Group’s chip technology firm Arm said its total revenues rose 35 percent to $2.7 billion in 2021 thanks to strong growth in both royalty and non-royalty revenue.

Arm said licensing (non-royalty) revenues were up 61 percent to $1.13 billion as product portfolio and new business models such as Arm Flexible Access gave more customers more reasons and more ways to license Arm technology.

Arm, which makes the basic blueprint used to design chips, said royalty revenues were up 20 percent to a record $1.54 billion, helped by strong growth of 5G smartphones, more ADAS and IVI chips going into cars, and price increases in 32-bit microcontrollers.

Arm, owned by SoftBank, shipped a record 29.2 billion chips in FY21, including nearly 8 billion (7.8 billion) in Q4.
“With more than 225 billion Arm-based chips shipped by our partners, we have the world’s largest computing footprint and a unique understanding of the complete compute spectrum,” said Rene Haas, CEO Arm. “Our compute platform will power the next set of technology revolutions across cloud computing, automotive and autonomous systems, the IoT, the Metaverse and beyond.”

Arm’s focus on the automotive sector three to four years ago was paying off and revenue from that segment more than doubled last year thanks to electrification and increasing computing power for cars.

SoftBank plans to take the British tech company public. Regulatory hurdles stopped a deal to sell it to U.S. chip maker Nvidia.