Bloomberg reported that Qualcomm’s July letter to customers laid out plans to charge more for chips shipped after Sept. 1, as rising production costs strained the company’s margins.
On the July 29 call for Qualcomm’s fiscal third quarter of 2026, the company described the planned increases as double-digit but gave no precise figure. Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala said the pricing actions covered several end markets.
Palkhiwala said existing contracts and product cycles would delay the changes in some cases, spreading their effect over time. Qualcomm’s fiscal third-quarter results cited higher expenses for memory, wafer fabrication, assembly, testing, advanced packaging and other materials. The company said those costs affected its June-quarter results and its outlook for the following quarter.
Chief Executive Cristiano Amon linked the pricing measures to higher input and wafer costs. He described the planned increases as small compared with the rise in memory costs included in device bills of materials. Previous increases for selected products failed to cover the full rise in input costs, keeping pressure on margins.
Device makers could bear the extra expense, raise product prices for buyers or switch to cheaper hardware. Qualcomm’s Nov. 4 results also showed that its handset chip revenue fell 26% in the fiscal fourth quarter.
Qualcomm expects the pricing actions to be fully reflected in gross margins at its chip division, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), during the latter half of fiscal 2027.
