SAN DIEGO — Handset chips, long Qualcomm‘s biggest business, dragged the company backward in its fiscal fourth quarter. Sales of those chips fell 26% to $5.14 billion, the company said on Wednesday, and total revenue slipped 8% to $10.32 billion.
Cars softened the blow. Automotive chip sales climbed 89% to $1.99 billion, a record for the business, and chips for connected devices brought in $1.89 billion, up 4%. Without those gains, the quarterly drop would have been steeper.
Qualcomm earned $1.25 billion in the quarter, or $1.17 a share. A year earlier, it had lost $3.12 billion, or $2.89 a share. On the adjusted basis most analysts follow, earnings came to $2.17 a share and revenue to $10.44 billion, slightly better than the $2.16 a share and $10.12 billion that analysts polled by FactSet had expected.
The chip operation as a whole, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, took in $9.02 billion, down 8%. Licensing, the smaller side of the company, contributed $1.30 billion, off 7%.
Chief Executive Cristiano Amon tied the outlook to the businesses beyond phones.
“Fiscal 2027 marks the start of our non-handset revenue inflection, including the ramp of our Data Center business,”
The company kept its target of $5 billion in data center revenue for fiscal 2027, and it expects non-handset revenue to grow more than 60% in that year. Two custom-silicon data center programs are set to ramp up in fiscal 2027.
For all of fiscal 2026, adjusted revenue totaled $43.2 billion.
Attention now turns to the December quarter, the first of the new fiscal year. Qualcomm expects revenue somewhere between $10.4 billion and $11.2 billion in that period, with adjusted earnings of $2.15 to $2.35 a share.
Investors focused on the handset slide and the profit outlook. Qualcomm shares fell 4.9% to $164.78 in after-hours trading on Wednesday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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