Date: 28/07/2009

ARM Q2 revenue report indicate weak microcontroller, processor and semiconductor IP market

indicate semiconductor IP market is still going down. The ARM processors are more present in consumer electronic gadgets like mobile phones, media players and such handheld personal digital devices. The consumer portable electronics market is not seeing any improvements in 2Q 09 and this might have made the ARM revenues not even match it's previous quarter's figures.

In microcontroller market, ARM is not as dominant as other proprietary processor cores from Renesas, Freescale and such top ranked MCU vendors. During this weak economy period the MCU companies with their own IPs are aggressively pushing their products resulting in very tight competition for ARM processor based MCUs.

But ARM is more upbeat with its CEO commenting; "The resilience of ARM in a difficult trading environment is demonstrated by these results for the first half of 2009. We continue to outperform the semiconductor industry; whilst ARM H1 dollar revenues declined 14%, overall industry revenues declined 30%. ARM technology-based chips continue to gain market share in both mobile and non-mobile applications."

ARM is not a semiconductor device company, it's an IP seller and it supplies the IP for most important and costly part of an electronics system, i.e. processor.

ARM7 and ARM9 top the list in IP licensing revenues followed by ARM11 and Cortex.

Like everybody in the semiconductor industry, ARM is pinning hope on second half of 2009. Intel is running fast to take on the market of netbook and tablet PC with it's ATOM processor but where as ARM don't have well packed solution for it's customers to compete with Intel in newly emerging portable electronics market, where notebook computer is diminishing to become something called netbook with added communications and entertainment features and the smartphones is slightly reshaping in size to provide more computing features.

ARM clearly needs an OS software partner to take on the changing market.