Chip Earnings Split the Market: Qualcomm Beats and Falls While Arm and GlobalFoundries Disappoint

Three chipmakers reported within hours of each other, all of them beat or nearly beat expectations, and the market sold two of them and shrugged at the third. That split is the story of this earnings week in semiconductors: in a market already nervous about AI spending, a beat is no longer enough. Guidance, segment mix and the handset cycle did the real damage.

Qualcomm was the biggest disappointment. The company reported fiscal fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $2.17 per share, a cent ahead of the $2.16 consensus, on revenue of about $10.44 billion — up just 8% from a year earlier and short of the roughly $10.48 billion Wall Street expected. The result was predictable, in the market's cold logic: its stock fell more than 6% after hours, and later reports put the after-hours drop at around 4–5%, to about $164.78. The quarter itself was not a disaster. The forecast was the problem, and so was the mix underneath it.

The mix tells the story. Revenue from Qualcomm's handset unit, which makes chips for smartphones, fell 26% to $5.14 billion in the fourth quarter, dragging the chip segment's revenue down 8% to $9.02 billion. Analysts polled by Visible Alpha had expected handset revenue of $5.25 billion. Global smartphone shipments fell 20% in the September quarter to a 14-year low, according to Counterpoint Research, and Qualcomm's declining Apple-related revenue added to the drag. CEO Cristiano Amon said the first-quarter fiscal 2027 forecast includes no further sales from Apple — a clean break with a relationship that once anchored the handset business.

Against that weakness, the growth stories inside Qualcomm are real but not yet big enough to carry the whole company. Automotive revenue rose 89% to $1.99 billion, and the company pointed to two custom-silicon programs with hyperscalers beginning in the current quarter, with a target of $5 billion in data-center revenue for the fiscal year. For the current quarter, Qualcomm guided to adjusted earnings of $2.15 to $2.35 per share on revenue between $10.4 billion and $11.2 billion — a midpoint below the Street's earnings target. The market read that as: the future is growing, the present is shrinking, and the bridge between them is longer than hoped.

Arm: a beat that still fell. Arm delivered the more palatable set of numbers and still fell. The chip design company reported adjusted earnings of 52 cents per share, just beating the Street's target of 48 cents, while revenue rose 27% from a year earlier to $1.44 billion, ahead of the $1.38 billion analyst estimate. Its stock was down about 2% in late trading. Guidance did little to excite investors: Arm expects earnings of 56 cents per share, plus or minus four cents, against a forecast of 55 cents, and revenue of $1.54 billion, plus or minus $50 million, just ahead of the $1.52 billion target. A beat on both lines, a guide that is merely fine, and a stock that falls anyway — that is what a nervous market does to good-but-not-great.

GlobalFoundries: flat is the new good. GlobalFoundries did a little better than its peers in the narrow sense that matters least: it posted results and guidance for the current quarter that squeaked past expectations, and its stock remained flat after hours. The company reported third-quarter adjusted earnings of 53 cents per share on sales of $1.9 billion, up 12% from a year earlier, with growth driven by strong demand from AI and data-center customers. For the current quarter it expects earnings of 59 cents per share, plus or minus five cents, on revenue of about $2 billion. Flat, in this tape, counts as resilience.

What the split means for stock analysis:
• Beats are priced in. After AMD's earnings beat just 24 hours earlier, expectations for chipmakers were elevated. Qualcomm beat earnings by a cent and still fell — the bar was the guide, not the quarter.
• Segment mix beats the headline. A company can grow 8% overall while its largest unit falls 26%. Handset weakness, not total revenue, set Qualcomm's price.
• Guidance is the event. All three companies' stocks moved on what comes next — Qualcomm's light profit guide, Arm's cautious guide, GlobalFoundries' just-good-enough guide — not on the quarters they just closed.
• AI demand is not uniform. Data-center and automotive demand is genuinely strong, but it has not yet replaced handset revenue at scale. Until it does, chip stocks will keep trading on two stories at once.
• Context matters. All of this landed on a day when the broader market rocketed higher on the US election results. Chipmakers falling into a roaring tape is a stock-specific verdict, not market noise.

FAQ:
Why did Qualcomm fall if it beat earnings expectations? Because the beat was tiny ($2.17 vs $2.16), revenue missed ($10.44 billion vs about $10.48 billion expected), handset revenue fell 26%, and current-quarter profit guidance came in light. The market priced the outlook, not the quarter.
Why did Arm fall despite beating on both revenue and earnings? Its guidance was only slightly ahead of forecasts, which was not enough to excite investors in a cautious market for chip stocks.
What is GlobalFoundries' result in one line? Third-quarter adjusted earnings of 53 cents per share on $1.9 billion in sales, up 12% year over year, with current-quarter guidance just past expectations — and a flat stock.
Does this change the AI chip story? No, but it narrows it. Data-center and automotive demand remains strong; the question is how fast it can replace shrinking handset revenue at companies like Qualcomm.
What should stock watchers follow next? The next guides from chipmakers, handset shipment data, and whether automotive and data-center revenue keeps compounding fast enough to offset the handset decline.

Follow stock coverage on the Zimbuck News page (https://zimbuck.com/pages/zimbucknews) and in the Zimbuck Market News group (https://zimbuck.com/groups/zimbuckmarketnews), and read the full chip-earnings report at the source linked in the References below. For related reading, see our earlier AMD earnings coverage and Arista earnings coverage, linked in References. Join the conversation on Zimbuck (https://zimbuck.com) to say which chip stock you are watching closest — and whether guidance or the headline number moves your decisions more. This article is market news and general information only, not financial advice.