Chip designer Arm is keen to prove the failed $40 billion (£29 billion) takeover by NVIDIA has done no harm with record revenues and record profits in FY21.
In its latest financial results, Arm says 2021 total revenues were up 35% to $2.7 billion (£2.2 billion) with “strong growth” in both royalty and non-royalty revenue.
Adjusted EBITDA had a 68% year-on-year boost to take it to $1 billion (£819 million), giving an adjusted EBITDA margin of 37%.
“Our record results demonstrate that the demand for Arm technology and the strength of the Arm ecosystem has never been greater – our compute platform will power the next set of technology revolutions across cloud computing, automotive and autonomous systems, the IoT, the metaverse and beyond,” says Rene Haas, CEO Arm.
The positive feelings are all well and good but as reported in March, Arm said it will cut between 12-15% of its workforce due to the collapse of NVIDIA’s takeover in February.
The majority of the losses will be in the UK and US – with up to 1,000 jobs being affected.
Arm explained at the time: “Like any business, Arm is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline. Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce.”
NVIDIA’s planned purchase of Arm from Japan’s SoftBank was terminated due to regulatory pressure.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority found that NVIDIA’s purchase of the chip developer raised “serious competition concerns”.
The US Federal Trade Commission had also started legal action to block the deal.
Elsewhere in its financial results, Arm explains that a record 29.2 billion chips were shipped in FY21, including nearly 7.8 billion in Q4.
The tech firm says more than 225 billion Arm-based chips were shipped by its partners, giving it “the world’s largest computing footprint”.
In terms of 2021 licensing (non-royalty) revenues, these were up 61% to $1.13 billion (£925 million) due to its expanded product portfolio and new business models such as Arm Flexible Access that “gave more customers more reasons and more ways to licence Arm technology”.
Royalty revenues were up 20% to a record $1.54 billion (£1.26 billion), “helped by continuing strong growth of 5G smartphones, more ADAS and IVI chips going into cars, and price increases in 32-bit microcontrollers”.