Raspberry Pi profits soar after IPO thanks to new single-board computer

Raspberry Pi profits soared in the first half of 2024 as the group enjoyed strong demand for one of its recently launched single-board computers.

The low-cost computer maker, which floated on London markets in June, reported adjusted profits before revenue rose 55 percent to $20.9 million (£15.6 million) in the six months ended June.

The company told shareholders it sold 1.1 million units of its Raspberry Pi5 during the period following the product’s unveiling in late October last year.

That helped orders for its single-board computers and compute modules rise by nearly a third to 3.7 million.

Raspberry Pi also benefited from semiconductor product sales that grew to 2.1 million units and a recovery from pandemic-related shortages that limited trade during the first half of 2023.

Its revenue rose 61 percent to $144 million, with more than half of the increase coming from component sales as the volume of microchips supplied to the company’s licensees increased amid an improvement in supply chain problems.

The Cambridge-based company expects higher unit volumes during the second half of this year, again supported by new product launches, although it believes profitability will be weighted towards the first half.

Raspberry Pi has just introduced a machine learning hardware product: the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, in collaboration with technology company Hailo and cloud connectivity product Raspberry Pi Connect.

The AI ​​kit hit the market about a week before Raspberry Pi’s successful IPO, which raised £178.9 million for the company.

It told investors it would spend the money on improving its supply chain, engineering projects and “other general corporate purposes.”

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said the company’s IPO was “the defining moment of the first half of the year.”

Raspberry Pi’s listing represents a rare victory for London markets, which have struggled to attract new IPOs and have seen multiple companies snapped up by foreign firms in recent years.

Only eight new companies will go public on the LSE in the first half of 2024, compared with 47 in the same period three years earlier.

Many companies choose to list in the US rather than the UK because they can potentially access much larger pools of capital and command higher valuations.

Since its listing in June, Raspberry Pi has entered the FTSE 250 index, making it one of the few, and its shares have risen by around a third to 369.8p and the group.

Raspberry Pi Actions rose 6.2 percent on Tuesday morning.

Mark Crouch, market analyst at investment platform eToro, said: ‘The potential rewards offered by the AI ​​industry are no secret, and with that comes a lot of competition, looking for a share of the spoils.

“But with recent data suggesting the value of the AI ​​market could grow up to tenfold by 2030, more tech investors may be eager for a slice of Raspberry Pi.”

Founded in 2009, the Raspberry Pi is the best-selling British computer of all time and is especially loved among hobbyists and amateur coders.

Over the past decade, more than 60 million of the company’s single-board computers have been purchased in more than 70 countries.

Their products are often used in edge computing, which is the practice of capturing, processing and analyzing data close to where it is created, rather than in a centralized data center.

Analysts at brokerage Peel Hunt said: “Recent sentiment does not distract us from our view that edge computing will do for Raspberry Pi what the desktop did for Microsoft, the smartphone did for Apple and the data centre is doing for NVIDIA.”