Arm shares slip after full-year revenue guidance falls shy of estimates

Investing.com -- Shares in Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM) dipped in extended hours trading after the chip designer delivered annual revenue guidance that fell short of estimates despite a wave of enterprise spending on artificial intelligence.

For its 2024 fiscal year, the SoftBank-backed company forecast revenue of between $3.8 billion and $4.1B, or $3.95B at the midpoint, just shy of expectations for $4.01B.

But the firm, which licenses chip designs to manufacturers who then pay them royalties for each semiconductor unit shipped, reported fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $0.36 on revenue of $928 million. That was ahead of Wall Street projections for EPS of $0.21 and sales of $780.2M.

It marked the third earnings report since Arm went public in one of the most highly-anticipated U.S. listings in nearly two years. Arm's stock price has surged since the IPO, leaving it with a market capitalization of $109.06B ahead of the earnings release.

Speaking in a post-earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas said adoption of Arm's V9 chip designs, which help power everything from smartphones to the large language models that support artificial intelligence, drove a 37% jump in royalties to $514 million in the quarter. The V9 now makes up around a fifth of total royalty revenues generated by Arm, up from roughly 15% in the prior quarter, with the company saying that it can command a "substantially" higher royalty per chip compared to prior designs.

Meanwhile, license revenue rose 60% versus a year ago to $414M thanks to "multiple high-value license agreements being signed as companies increase investment in Arm-based technology for AI across all end markets," the group said.

"The way to think about licensing revenue as it applies to AI is, as software is moving faster than hardware, the hardware designs need to be upgraded quickly to make sure they can capture the needs of these new AI workloads," Haas noted. "So, because of that, we have seen huge growth in our licensing activity."

Analysts at Goldman Sachs said that while some traders may have perceived Arm's revenue outlook as "underwhelming," they still found the fourth-quarter results to be "strong." However, they argued that investors will likely want to see Arm focus more on its royalty operations, adding that revenue from licensing activities tends to be "lumpy and unpredictable."

Yasin Ebrahim contributed to this report.