Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference on May 2, 2022, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Qualcomm reported second-quarter earnings on Wednesday that were in line with analyst expectations but saw sales from handset chips, a core business for the company, decline 17% on an annual basis.
Qualcomm shares fell over 4% in extended trading.
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Here’s how the chipmaker did versus Refinitiv consensus estimates:
EPS: $2.15 per share, adjusted, versus expectations of $2.15 per share
Revenue: $9.27 billion, versus expectations of $9.1 billion
In the quarter ending in March, Qualcomm said net income fell 42% to $1.70 billion, or $1.52 per share, from $2.93 billion, or $2.57 per share, a year ago.
Qualcomm said it expected around $8.5 billion in sales in the current quarter, short of Wall Street expectations of $9.14 billion. Analysts were expecting current-quarter earnings guidance of $2.16 per share, but Qualcomm said it expected it that to be around $1.80.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon in a statement blamed the results on a challenging environment, and the company said it had not seen evidence that smartphone sales are recovering in China. The smartphone market is looking at a tough 2023, with shipments for the global market declining over 14% in the first quarter, according to IDC.
“The evolving macroeconomic backdrop has resulted in further demand deterioration, particularly in handsets, at a magnitude greater than we previously forecasted,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said on a call with analysts.
Qualcomm’s chip segment, called QCT, sells smartphone processors, automotive chips, and other parts for advanced electronics. It declined 17% to $7.94 billion in revenue during the quarter.
The biggest part of QCT’s sales come from handset chips, which are the processors at the heart of most Android phones. Qualcomm reported $6.11 billion in handset sales, down 17% from last year.
Qualcomm said it expected a larger-than-normal decline in the third-quarter for QTL revenue, saying that it was related to “the timing of purchases by a modem-only handset customer.” Qualcomm rarely discusses its business with Apple, and didn’t name the company, but Apple does purchase modems from the company for its iPhones and other devices.
Qualcomm’s automotive business, which includes chips and software for cars, is still small, although it showed 20% growth during the quarter to $447 million in revenue. It’s reported as part of QTL.
Qualcomm’s licensing segment, QTL, which sells access to technologies needed for cellular service, reported an 18% annual decrease in revenue to $1.29 billion.
Qualcomm said it made $900 million in share repurchases and paid $800 million in dividends during the quarter.
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.
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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.
Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.
The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.
The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.