Arm, a chip technology company under Softbank group, reported on Thursday that its revenue in 2021 hit a record Ren Haas, chief executive of arm, said in an interview that the company's new chip design business showed strong prospects.
Softbank now plans to list the British technology company after its sale of arm to NVIDIA, a US chipmaker, was aborted due to regulatory obstacles.
Arm developed the basic blueprint for designing chips. The company's report released on Thursday showed that last year's revenue was $2.7 billion, an increase of 35% compared with the previous year. Among them, the revenue of authorized business increased by 61% year-on-year to US $1.13 billion; Chip technology royalties rose 20% to $1.54 billion.
Haas said that the licensing business aims to "let (customer) companies spend money with arm to design chips for the future".
When asked about the revenue outlook, he replied: "we have never done more than $1 billion before. So I want to say that this is a good leading indicator of demand for this product."
Haas said that chip shipments using ARM technology last year were 29.2 billion, including nearly 8 billion in the fourth quarter. He also said that arm's efforts to focus on the automotive industry three to four years ago have now paid off. Thanks to the improvement of electrification and automotive computing power, the revenue of related businesses more than doubled last year.
Speaking of arm's auto business, Haas said: "if there is more supply, the situation is likely to be better."
As for how much potential value arm may realize in the stock market once it is listed, Haas declined to talk about it. In September 2020, NVIDIA proposed to acquire arm for up to $40 billion. Finally, Softbank bought the company for $32 billion.
Haas also reiterated that arm had settled the public dispute of its Chinese joint venture arm China and dismissed Wu xiongang, the former CEO of the joint venture. He said that arm China's revenue accounted for about 20% of the company's total revenue.
"I can say that we achieved very good results last year, and none of this would have happened without the excellent performance of the Chinese joint venture," he said