Qualcomm Stock Slides After Earnings Beat
By Adam Levine
Updated Nov 05, 2025, 4:10 pm EST / Original Nov 05, 2025, 12:01 am EST
Shares of Qualcommwere sliding in late trading on Wednesday despite strong results from the chip maker.
The company reported adjusted earnings of $3.00 a share in its fiscal fourth quarter, versus Wall Street estimates for $2.87. Revenue came in at $11.27 billion, surpassing the $10.77 billion consensus estimate, according to FactSet.
Shares of Qualcomm were down 1.4% on the news.
This is breaking news. Read a preview of Qualcomm earnings below and check back for more analysis soon.
After a run of strong earnings reports, Wall Street analysts expect some fourth-quarter deceleration from Qualcomm, best known as a chip maker for Android smartphones.
The wild card continues to be the company’s diversification efforts, with chips for cars, PCs, and even new artificial-intelligence accelerators due to begin rolling out next year.
Qualcomm reports earnings Wednesday afternoon. The consensus estimate is for adjusted earnings-per-share of $2.87, up from $2.69 last year, on revenue of $10.77 billion, growing by 5% over 2024. This would break a string of five quarters where the company’s revenue grew by double-digits.
Analysts expect an 8% growth in Qualcomm’s core smartphone business, but project slowdowns elsewhere will drive the deceleration. Automotive chip sales had been the star of the show, growing at an average 59% rate in the previous five quarters, but analysts expect a more modest 14% rate in the fourth quarter.
The introduction of Qualcomm’s PC chips fueled an average of 27% growth in the internet-of-things segment over the last four quarters, but the fourth-quarter consensus estimate is for a mere 2% rise.
The big drag is projected to come from Qualcomm’s licensing revenue, expected to be down 11% from last year. Qualcomm has the best cellular radio chips and it uses that leverage to charge a per-device royalty on smartphones. A big factor in this is Apple, which is slowly cutting out Qualcomm as a vendor.
This requirement has led to a lot of friction with customers and antitrust agencies worldwide. Though Qualcomm has escaped regulation in the U.S., the same can’t be said for China and South Korea, where the company long ago paid fines and agreed to change its licensing terms.
The biggest customer conflict was with Apple, which chafed at the per-device royalties. Though Apple settled an antitrust suit to Qualcomm’s favor in 2019, it spent the last six years looking to replace Qualcomm’s 5G chips with its own silicon. The process of Qualcomm losing Apple’s business has begun with certain low-volume iPhones and the 2025 iPad Pro. Apple hasn’t cracked the hardest part of this shift, still unable to support the problematic 5G “millimeter-wave” frequencies at the top end of the spectrum.
Qualcomm has been preparing investors for the loss of Apple’s chip and licensing sales for years now, and so it is already likely to be factored into the share price.
Qualcomm shares are up 16% this year, roughly the same as the S&P 500 index.
Through Monday’s close, the stock was up 7% since the company announced its new AI accelerator chips and servers, but there is a long road for them to make a dent in Qualcomm’s financials. The first job is convincing customers to forgo the industry-standard, Nvidia.
The biggest hurdle may be finding customers besides “hyperscalers” such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud, which prefer their own chips as an alternative to Nvidia.
Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com
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