SoftBank Group (9984) Investor Update summary

Business performance and growth drivers

• Achieved record revenues in three of the last four quarters, with over 20% year-on-year revenue growth forecasted and a 45% non-GAAP operating margin; strong cash flows and no debt.

• Customers shipped over 310 billion Arm-based chips to date, with 30 billion shipped in the last fiscal year and 8 billion per quarter.

• Arm's technology powers a broad range of devices, including smartphones, data centers, automotive, PCs, networking, and IoT.

• Over 50% market share in chips with CPUs, supported by a vast ecosystem of 20 million developers and 1.5 billion ecosystem hours.

• All major technology companies are long-term customers, including Alphabet, Amazon, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Microsoft.

Technology and product strategy

• Accelerated R&D investment to develop next-generation technology, focusing on security, AI acceleration, and GPU performance.

• Ongoing development of Armv9 architecture, with new products like Cortex-X925 and Neoverse V3, focusing on higher performance, security, and AI acceleration.

• Compute Subsystem (CSS) initiative offers pre-integrated, optimized chip design platforms, accelerating time to market and enabling partner innovation.

• Partnerships with leading foundries and ecosystem partners ensure broad compatibility and ease of chip development.

• Investing in chiplet technology and new standards for modular chip design, with over 60 companies collaborating on chiplet system architecture.

AI and market trends

• AI is a major growth driver, with demand for high-performance chips to support evolving AI algorithms across all device categories.

• CPUs are increasingly important for AI inference, especially at the edge, while GPUs handle training.

• Project Stargate and Cristal intelligence, in partnership with SoftBank and OpenAI, aim to boost demand and accelerate R&D using AI tools.

• Arm CPUs are the default in many cloud providers' custom chips, with 8 of the top 10 hyperscalers deploying Arm-based chips.

• Significant investments in AI, from data center to edge, targeting generative AI, autonomous driving, and smart home applications.