Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon (pictured) blamed an ongoing slowdown in the sale of smartphones as a primary factor for declining chipset revenue in its fiscal Q2 2023 (which ran to 26 March), predicting little turnaround in the coming months.

On Qualcomm’s earnings call, Amon explained it had a backlog of phone chips and predicted inventory drawdown dynamics would continue to impact its performance over at least the next six months.

“The evolving macroeconomic backdrop has resulted in further demand deterioration particularly in handsets at a magnitude greater than we previously forecast”.

“Additionally, while expectations are for a rebound in China demand in the second half of the calendar year, we have not seen evidence of meaningful recovery and are not incorporating improvements into our planning assumption.”

Net income fell 42 per cent year-on-year to $1.7 billion on revenue of $9.3 billion, down 17 per cent.

Chipset revenue fell 17 per cent to $7.9 billion, with the handset figure falling by the same proportion to $6.1 billion.

IoT chip sales fell 24 per cent to $1.4 billion.

Automotive revenue grew 20 per cent to $447 million.

The QTL licensing segment’s revenue fell 18 per cent to $1.3 billion.