Qualcomm is everywhere nowadays. If you didn’t know of the tech company this time last year, you can be sure you do this year. As nearly every device released which is considered a ‘good’ device seems to come with a Qualcomm inside. In short, there are Snapdragons of all kinds, everywhere today. With so many dragons snapping at your heels it would be assumed Qualcomm are doing pretty good for themselves. Well, Qualcomm have today announced their figures for their fourth quarter and generally speaking, things are good for the company. In terms of units, Qualcomm have announced they shipped 236 million MSM chips in the fourth quarter. This is up 24% on what was shipped last year in the same quarter and up 5% from the last (third) quarter. More widely this means Qualcomm shipped 861 million MSM chips this year which is an overall 20% increase on last year.
What does that mean in terms of cold hard money? Well, for the fourth quarter this equates to $6.69 billion in revenue. This is a 3% increase from this quarter last year although this also represented a 2% drop compared to the previous quarter. More widely, in terms of revenue this equates to $26.49 billion over the year which is a 7% increase compared to last year. The operating income for the fourth quarter was $1.99 billion which was up 25% compared to the same quarter last year, but down 4% from the last quarter. This equates to a yearly operating income of $7.55 billion which is a 4% increase from last year. Lastly, the net income seemed to follow the same trend as the revenue and operating incomes. Net income for the fourth quarter totaled $1.89 billion which again was a 26% increase from the same quarter last year, although also again a 15% drop compared to last quarter. For the yearly, this means a net income of $7.97 billion which is a 16% percent increase year-on-year.
So overall it seems that the quarterly revenue, operating income and net income were all slightly down compared to the third quarter numbers, but overall were up compared to the same time last year. Not to mention the overall yearly figures were all higher than what was recorded last year. So not a bad quarter or year for the chip giant. To make things a little sweeter Qualcomm are also looking forward to 2015 and in particular the allure of the Chinese market. How do you think Qualcomm will do in 2015?