Today's consumers want

Today's consumers want

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Fujitsu Laptop Battery

The good news? As you'd expect from a business of ARM's size and caliber, the company has in place a risk management policy, a system of regular reviews, and a number of high-level committees tasked with monitoring the risks that the business has identified.

Read the small print, and ARM identifies just five risks as being material enough to have a significant prospective impact on the company's financial performance -- not many, to be sure, but bear in mind that ARM is in the business of designing chips rather than manufacturing them, and is essentially a business selling and licensing intellectual property to some of the world's largest electronics and computer businesses.

Today's mobile phone and desktop computer markets are very different from those of -- say -- a decade ago. Taking phones as an example, names such as Nokia and Motorola are on the wane, and names such as Apple with battery such as Fujitsu FPCBP177 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP179 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook S7210 Battery, Fujitsu BTP-C0K8 Battery, Fujitsu Esprimo Mobile V6505 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP79 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP78 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP225 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP226 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP227 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP230 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP88 Battery, Samsung, and HTC are the preeminent suppliers. And typically, during such shifts, a period of consolidation ensues. As ARM puts it:

About half of ARM's revenue comes from direct licence sales to semiconductor companies. If there are fewer semiconductor companies, then ARM may have fewer customers to sell to. ARM is exposed to a range of markets including wireless handsets and microcontrollers. Consolidation in these parts of the industry could represent a loss to ARM's future licensing business.

As ARM points out, the risk is a very real one. In 2011, for instance, its customer base witnessed Qualcomm's acquisition of Atheros, and Broadcom's acquisition of Netlogic.

What can ARM do about this? Not a lot. But, as it points out, it does strive to make sure that customers get the message that ARM's technology is an opportunity to reduce costs as companies work to combine their businesses into one. As ARM notes: "In consolidating companies, ARM technology is often a standard that both companies can integrate around."

Today's consumers want portable products that keep them connected to their social and business networks, have an all-day battery life, and are simple to use. So in response, smartphones are getting smarter, and laptops are getting smaller and more portable, and the market is seeing new "crossover" mobile computing products introduced.

And to be sure, this is providing an opportunity for smartphone technology to cross over into laptops -- but more worryingly for ARM's shareholders, it's also providing an opportunity for the reverse. As ARM puts it:

The main processor in a laptop is typically based on the x86 architecture. Smaller and lower power x86‑based chips are being developed that will be suitable for the main processor in a smartphone. They are capable of reducing ARM's market share in smartphone application processors, and hindering any market share gains that might be made by ARM licensees in mobile computing.