back to article ARM posts sterling revenue growth, but moneymen spank it anyway

UK chip designer ARM Holdings PLC announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2013 on Tuesday, and despite solid revenue growth and a positive guidance, the company behind the chips that power the vast majority of the world's smartphones and tablets was spanked by The City's moneymen. The reason for the immediate …

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  1. Mitoo Bobsworth
    Unhappy

    Fuck the moneymen

    they're not happy unless they're gaming something.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fuck the moneymen

      Just got a big payoff for mis-sold PPI. Now might be a good time to buy ARM stock with the money ...

  2. P0l0nium

    One off charges??

    I love the way Payroll Taxes are considered "One-off charges"....

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/arm-swings-to-loss-despite-revenue-growth-2014-02-04?siteid=yhoof2

    And you thought Mickey Mouse had gone back to acting.

  3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    City Moneymen?

    Donkeymen more like.

    Honestly who believes this lot of jerks any more?

    Come in right on estimate - Get hammered for not exceeding estimates

    Come in above estimate - Get hammered for being at the top of a bubble.

    You can't win with this lot of lowlifes.

  4. Charles Manning

    Silly city

    ARM is hardly tied to Smartphones or other shiny turds the city-boys carry in their pockets.

    ARM is pretty much everywhere in embedded electronics and that is only growing.

    A typical laptop has about 4 or so ARM cores in it: many in the disk drive, one in the wifi...

    That car the city-boy bought with last year's bonus probably has 20 or more ARMs controlling body electronics, dash, etc.

    The microwave he heats up his fusion cuisine chicken in probably has an ARM, or two, in it.

    And the list goes on.

    Pity he doesn't have an ARM in his skull.

  5. Alan Denman

    ARM were out manouvered.

    Most marketing has gone into promoting older chips at ARMS expense.

    With little take up of the much faster Cortex A15, ARM themselves got forced to go backwards in launching the likes of the A12.

    As supposed partners of big American corporations they certainly look a bit brow beaten.

  6. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

    Laser-focused money men

    They do seem to have a point; 2.9 billion chips shipped, £95.5 million pre-tax profit, so that's about 3p a chip.

    You have to sell a lot of chips to reap the rewards and have to find a lot of new opportunities to keep expanding in a saturated market. And on-going expansion is what the money men seem to favour.

    Investment is not solely about how well they have done but how well they will do. There are opportunities for ARM but it remains to be seen if they can offset shortfalls elsewhere. I expect ARM will become favoured again if they can secure the IoT market. ARM is however up against a lot of credible competition in the low-cost chip sector and that's what IoT needs to really take off.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Laser-focused money men

      The margins have always been like that, It may even be the reason so many companies do business with them. Unlike Intel who still demand absurdly large margins.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Laser-focused money men

      " I expect ARM will become favoured again if they can secure the IoT market. "

      Is there really an IoT market?

      If there is, in what way is it different from the existing consumer+professional electronics market which ARM already dominate?

      If there is, which other architecture is in with a chance besides ARM? x86 is a non-starter (unless Intel are paying). MIPS has a niche. Where's PowerPC these days? The Chinese were rumoured to be developing MIPS-derived chips (e.g. longson/loongson), and some rather fanciful stories at one time that they were developing an Alpha-derived chip whose name I forget. Where are they now?

      1. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

        Re: Laser-focused money men

        Is there really an IoT market?

        A very small one at present but the potential is there. It likely will be a cost sensitive playing field and the competition isn't really Intel and traditional CPU chips but more with cheaper microcontrollers from Atmel, Microchip and the like.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: cheaper microcontrollers from Atmel, Microchip etc

          "the competition isn't really Intel and traditional CPU chips but more with cheaper microcontrollers from Atmel, Microchip and the like."

          For non-networked kit, I entirely agree.

          If you want something that does real networking, surely you want a real OS, in which case would you really start with silicon from Atmel, Microchip, etc ?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Norm

    I have followed ARM shares for many years.

    A positive report from ARM is almost always met by a drop in the share price.

    There is something seriously wrong when the share value of a company has a negative relationship to its profitability or assets.

    1. P0l0nium

      Re: The Norm

      There's something wrong with any share value when the P/E ratio goes over 100 without a truly astronomic growth forecast.

    2. Tom 13

      Re: The Norm

      Not at all. Markets are future looking, not past.

      Of course if you think ARM is now undervalued and should easily return to previous levels, you have an excellent money making opportunity.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not just phones, but tablets, Raspberry Pi. I've got quite a lot of ARM based kit, synthesiser modules and so on.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The important thing in the market is that prices change - it doesn't really matter why or in which direction, its the change itself that provides opportunities for profit.

    1. Jes.e

      It doesn't really matter why or..

      "The important thing in the market is that prices change - it doesn't really matter why or in which direction, its the change itself that provides opportunities for profit."

      Agree!

      Additionally, even though all economists will disagree with each other on just about everything, they do all agree in infinite growth (except the steady state refusnicks) and so with growth and debt, new money will be conjured into existence so there will be more money to move into private non-taxed havens.

      Of course the money is worth slightly less by doing so..

      The problem is that the economy (the real one that makes things) is not truly growing. It mostly peaked out along with oil production which has remained flat since 2005 (the oil production).

      The economy growth exactly matches energy growth in terms of BTU.

      We are getting a small degree of additional growth but this is from increased energy production through fracking and is why coal and (shudder) oil shale are being brought online as fast as possible.

      The politicians have no answer to this as anyone who is anti-growth will simply not get elected.

      I encourage everyone to take a look at "The Man Who Fell to Earth" or "The Machine Stops" to see our future.

  10. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    These are the same guys behind the last banking collapse.

    Who would miss a few?

    Just saying.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: These are the same guys behind the last banking collapse.

      Who would miss a few?

      Shortly before the banking collapse I was programming software for trading systems. Thanks to that I got to meet a lot of traders and their managers, and I was astounded by how little they knew about the markets they traded in. These were not complex derivatives, but more traditional trading in bonds and shares. The traders were typically dealing in one specific area, such as shares in firms involved with chip manufacturing, but hadn't a clue about the products or what drove demand for them. They were basically gambling, and followed their colleagues like lemmings terrified of making a different decision form their peers. As a result, I wasn't at all surprised by the crash and the ensuing panic amongst the banks.

  11. Trollslayer

    Good time to buy

    Since ARM based servers will make a big dent in that market.

    Don't buy Intel.

  12. PAT MCCLUNG

    Clerk

    ARM is an example of how success in computing IP can be achieved, because of their strategy ofopening and cheaply licensing a computer architecture. MIPS, with 64 registers, has a better architecture. The IBM Power PC is a vastly better computer architecture, made now irrelevant by the truly lame-brained analysts at IBM Finance, now driving that company to its ultimate destruction. But all are better than the Intel x86, an absurdity before the first chip was produced, universally acknowledged for 30 years to be a really bad way to design and make a computer.

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