Qualcomm’s diversification into automotive and IoT markets continued to pay dividends during the company’s fiscal second quarter of 2025, though like most other chip and electronics producers, Qualcomm remains wary of the potential near-term effect of Trump tariffs on its businesses.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said during the company’s fiscal Q2 earnings call that Qualcomm has seen “no material impact” from tariffs thus far, but continues to monitor the situation. For now, Qualcomm can celebrate the fact that its push into automotive and IoT is yielding strong results. During the most recent quarter, IoT revenues reached $1.58 billion, a jump of 27% year-over-year, and Automotive sales hit $959 million, soaring 59% year-over-year.
Along with 12% year-over-year growth in handset revenue to $6.92 billion, these figures helped propel the company to overall revenue of $10.8 billion in fiscal Q2, representing 15% year-over-year growth.
Qualcomm COO and CFO Akash Palkhiwala said during the call, “In the IoT area, we saw tremendous growth in the quarter… and we saw growth across all three areas, so consumer, networking and industrial. The largest growth contributor was actually industrial. As we’ve discussed in the past, we have this premise of where the market is going, which is a transition from microcontrollers to microprocessors and AI. We’re seeing the benefit of our technology portfolio as it applies to that transition, and we’re at the front end of the transition in our minds.”
Amon also chimed in that Qualcomm is starting to see the benefits of its ability to support edge and on-device AI processing of a growing number of small language models, and that this market evolution has only just begun.
As has been typical across the sector this earnings season, Qualcomm issued guidance for its next quarter that was viewed as somewhat soft in recognition of tariff uncertainties, based on the reception of analysts and after-hours share movement. The company projected fiscal third quarter revenue to come in between $9.9 billion and $10.7 billion, which puts the midpoint in the outlook under the analysts consensus estimate of $10.3 billion. The outlook sent QCOM stock down about 8% to around $137 as markets opened Thursday.