By Lisa Fleisher
The chief executive of British chip designer ARM Holdings PLC
said Tuesday that he expects the market for chips in mobile,
networking and microcontroller sectors to grow by about 50% through
2018.
As concern grows over the global saturation of high-end
smartphones, ARM CEO Simon Segars said there is a big opportunity
in low- to medium-priced smartphones. Chips designed by the company
are in 95% of all smartphones.
"We're just scratching the surface of where mobile's going to go
and what mobile can do," Mr. Segars said during the Cambridge-based
company's annual investor and analyst day.
Beyond phones and tablets, the company is looking for growth in
phone carrier networks, server and cloud-computing data centers,
and microcontrollers and chips in everyday devices, or a concept
known as the "Internet of things."
"The 'Internet of things' has the opportunity to benefit pretty
much every company on the planet, and every company can become
high-tech in some way or another," Mr. Segars said.
ARM currently has about 5% of the growing networking, servers
and data storage market, and about 22% of the market for
microcontrollers and other connected objects. Mr. Segars forecast
the markets for those categories will grow by about 50% to $20
billion each by 2018.
Write to Lisa Fleisher at lisa.fleisher@wsj.com
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