By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Qualcomm on Wednesday forecast fiscal second-quarter profit slightly above Wall Street estimates and sales in line with market expectations, as a new line of AI-enabled chips helps power it out of last year’s smartphone slump.
Qualcomm predicted sales and adjusted profit with a midpoint of $9.30 billion and $2.30 per share for the current fiscal second quarter ending in March. The outlook compares with analyst estimates of $9.30 billion and $2.25 per share, according to data from LSEG.
Qualcomm is the biggest supplier of chips to a smartphone market that had its worst sales year in a decade in 2023. As the smartphone industry slowly recovers, Qualcomm is facing competition on multiple fronts, with Huawei and Samsung Electronics both selling phones powered by in-house chips and Taiwan’s MediaTek challenging Qualcomm’s stronghold in mid- and premium-tier Android phones.
But the San Diego, California, company last year renewed a chip supply deal with Apple. It is also expanding into other markets such as personal computers, with partners such as Dell Technologies and Lenovo Group expected to debut laptops with chips that Qualcomm claims are faster than Apple’s in-house processors.
For the fiscal first quarter ended on Dec. 24, Qualcomm reported sales and adjusted profit of $9.94 billion and $2.75 per share, above estimates of $9.52 billion and $2.37 per share, according to LSEG data.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Arsheeya Singh Bajwa in Bengaluru and Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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