Qualcomm beats on earnings, highlights growth in Meta smartglasses

Qualcomm reported fiscal third-quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations and provided a stronger-than-expected guide for the current quarter. Qualcomm shares slid in extended trading.

Here’s how the chipmaker did for the quarter ending June 29 compared to LSEG consensus expectations:

• Earnings per share: $2.77 adjusted versus $2.71 expected
• Revenue: $10.37 billion versus $10.35 billion expected

In the current quarter, Qualcomm said it expected $2.85 per share at the midpoint of adjusted earnings on $10.7 billion in revenue at the midpoint. Analysts polled by LSEG were expecting $2.83 in adjusted earnings per share on $10.35 billion in revenue.

Net income during the quarter ending in June was $2.66 billion, or $2.43 per share, versus $2.13 billion, or $1.88 per share a year ago.

Qualcomm’s most important business is selling chips for smartphones under its Snapdragon brand, including the central processor and modem for high-end devices made by Samsung. It also provides modems to Apple. Its handset chip business reported $6.33 billion in revenue during the quarter, just shy of Wall Street expectations of $6.44 billion.

Qualcomm expects to lose Apple as a customer for its modem business in the coming years. But the company has been working to diversify its business by making chips for other devices, including Windows PCs and Meta‘s Quest virtual-reality headsets and Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon highlighted the company’s work with Meta in a short interview on Wednesday.

He said that making chips for devices like Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses was a good example of the chipmaker’s AI strategy, which was to embrace “personal AI,” or AI applications that run on devices, not the cloud.

Qualcomm reports its Meta revenues under its “Internet of Things” division, which had $1.68 billion in revenue during the quarter.

Amon referenced Mark Zuckerberg’s AI vision statement Wednesday that focused on “personal superintelligence,” saying “the upside we had in the quarter within IoT is what we do in with smart glasses.”

CFO Akash Palkhiwala said that Meta had stronger-than-expected chip consumption during the quarter.

On Monday, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica said that sales of the smart glasses more than tripled on an annual basis.

“Mark put out a video today, just with a very clear vision of how they see personal AI and super intelligence evolving, and we are a key part of making that division happen,” Palkhiwala said.

Amon also said Qualcomm would start to provide data about how much its chip business is growing without Apple — about 15% this year, he said.

Qualcomm is also looking to expand into data centers and sell versions of its chips that can be used for deploying artificial intelligence, Amon said on a call with an analysts. He said that Qualcomm was already in discussions with a major cloud company — called a hyperscaler — to supply AI chips. He said that Qualcomm could start to see revenues in its fiscal 2028.

“While we are in the early stages of this expansion, we are engaged with multiple potential customers,” Amon said. “We are currently in advanced discussions with a leading hyperscaler.”

The company’s automotive business has been highlighted by Amon as one of the biggest growth opportunities for the company, but in the third quarter, it grew 21% to $984 million, below the 24% growth rate of the company’s IoT business.

“As you look forward, the growth opportunity that we have in auto and IoT far exceeds the scale of the Apple revenue,” Palkhiwala said on the call.

Qualcomm’s other major division is QTL, which includes licensing fees for technology that Qualcomm developed and patented, including parts of the 5G standard. Overall, QTL revenues rose 11% to $1.32 billion.

Qualcomm said it spent just under $1 billion on cash dividends and $2.8 billion repurchasing 19 million shares of its stock during the quarter.