Raspberry Pi (LON:RPI) management said fiscal 2025 was a “standout year,” pointing to rising unit shipments, stronger demand trends into early 2026, and a crossover milestone in its semiconductor business, while also flagging elevated DRAM prices as a key operational theme for 2026 and beyond.
2025 demand strengthened through the year
Eben Upton, speaking during the company’s final results investor presentation, said demand “built steadily throughout 2025,” with the second half stronger than the first, and the fourth quarter stronger than the third. He highlighted “particular strength” in the company’s two largest markets, the United States and China.
Boult said the stronger finish to 2025 “carried on into quarter one,” with Q1 volumes tracking similarly to the Q4 run-rate.
Financial results: units up, margin per board improved
Upton said board and module shipments increased 9% to 7.8 million units, contributing to a 25% increase in EBITDA. Boult, referencing the year’s totals, said overall unit volume was 7.6 million, up about 9% from 2024. He reported gross profit per unit of $8.70, up from $7.40 a year earlier, which he attributed primarily to a better mix—more Raspberry Pi 5 and Raspberry Pi 4 boards versus lower-priced products such as Pico.
Boult also noted a cost improvement on Raspberry Pi 5 as the company moved beyond the first 2 million boards that used an earlier version of the Broadcom BCM2712 that was “$5 more expensive,” lowering Pi 5 costs and lifting margins. He said gross profit rose 23% and adjusted EBITDA increased about 25% year-over-year to $46.4 million, while adjusted earnings per share rose 35% to $0.145 from $0.107.
On cash and liquidity, Boult said year-end cash was GBP 28 million, down from GBP 45 million a year earlier, and that the company’s GBP 80 million revolving credit facility remained undrawn. He attributed the cash movement largely to working capital changes, including the unwind of extended payables from 2024.
DRAM prices: supply, pricing actions, and expectations
Management repeatedly emphasized DRAM cost inflation as a major factor shaping 2026. Boult said memory costs have increased “significantly” since the summer of last year, driven by hyperscalers’ demand for High Bandwidth Memory and a shift in production by memory manufacturers away from general-purpose computing and mobile. He described memory prices as having risen roughly sevenfold in the recent period shown.
Boult said Raspberry Pi has taken several steps since last summer, including widening the supplier base beyond historical reliance on Micron and Samsung, pursuing technical approaches to use memory more efficiently, and making larger purchases when possible. He said the company has already increased product prices and indicated “there will be more coming over this year,” aiming to maintain gross profit per unit.
Looking ahead, Boult said the company expects “highly elevated DRAM prices to continue into 2026 and probably into 2027,” with a more durable supply-side resolution more likely in 2028 than 2027 due to the time and capital required to add fab capacity.
Despite the headwinds, Upton said the company is “comfortable that we have the inventory and the relationships to navigate” the DRAM environment, framing it as “more as an opportunity to take market share and build customer loyalty than as a threat.”
In response to an investor question about sales impact, Upton said the company has “yet to see significant evidence of elasticity” reducing overall demand, but expects “density elasticity” over time, with users and customers potentially “trading down” to lower-memory configurations as prices remain elevated.
Product and strategy updates: Connect, Edge AI, and semiconductors
Upton said 2025 was slower than 2024 in product launches but still among the company’s strongest historically, highlighting new microcontroller variants that embed non-volatile memory alongside the RP2350 die. He singled out Raspberry Pi Connect as a major development, calling it the company’s first software product and noting that it added features in 2025 including over-the-air firmware updates targeted at paid OEM users of “Raspberry Pi Connect for organizations.”
Upton said the Connect platform ended 2025 with about 370,000 registered devices and has surpassed 500,000 registered devices “today.” In Q&A, he also confirmed plans to bring Connect to the microcontroller family, suggesting over-the-air updates may arrive before remote access features in that product category.
On hardware, Upton highlighted several launches as representative of the company’s direction:
- Radio Module 2: A product aimed at providing “turnkey wireless interfacing” for microcontroller customers and bridging embedded platforms to the network.
- Raspberry Pi Five Hundred Plus: An all-in-one PC positioned as a higher-performance client device built on the Raspberry Pi 5 platform.
- AI HAT+ 2: Launched in mid-January, built on collaboration with accelerator vendor Hailo, enabling accelerated workloads including vision transformer models, large language models, and vision language models.
Upton also discussed the company’s “board-to-board” program aimed at engaging major industrial OEMs at the C-suite level, saying the company has seen interest from smart home and aerospace and defense customers. He said Raspberry Pi refined its reseller network in 2025, retiring underperforming partners and making targeted geographic and sector additions.
On the semiconductor business, Upton said 2025 was the “crossover year,” with chip sales up 47% year-over-year to 8.4 million units—more chips than boards for the first time. He described semiconductors as both a way to build “better boards and modules” and a potential “second franchise” over time. In Q&A, he said microcontroller sales in 2025 were influenced by a pair of large orders—roughly 500,000 units from a Taiwanese customer and 800,000 units from a Scandinavian customer—while suggesting ongoing momentum and long product tails, particularly for RP2040.
Other investor topics: diversion concerns and operational changes
Asked about reports that Raspberry Pi boards have appeared in conflict-related weapon systems via the gray market, Upton said the company is aware of use “particularly [in] Russian drone platforms” in the Ukraine war and has conducted a detailed review of “diversion.” He said Raspberry Pi has strengthened requirements—especially for units sold into China—around reseller-provided end-use information, with support from licensee partner Premier Farnell and Chinese approved resellers. Boult added that the company has made the “unacceptability” of such diversion clear and reinforced expectations via terms of trade.
Operationally, Upton said Raspberry Pi continued hiring in engineering, added senior silicon engineers, and maintained what he described as a 100% retention rate in the engineering team aside from one retirement. He also announced that Tim Mamtora joined the company in a newly created Chief Operating Officer role, with responsibilities expected to centralize engineering operations, manufacturing operations, supply chain, IT, and cybersecurity.
On outlook, Upton said the company entered 2026 with momentum and “substantial customer backlogs.” Boult added that profitability is expected to be in line with market estimates, while Upton said revenue is “likely to be substantially higher than market estimates” due to product price increases and higher average selling prices tied to memory costs.
About Raspberry Pi (LON:RPI)
Our mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of engineers and enthusiasts all over the world.
Since 2012, we’ve been designing single-board and modular computers, built on the Arm architecture, and running the Linux operating system. Whether you’re an educator looking to excite the next generation of computer scientists; an enthusiast searching for inspiration for your next project; or an OEM who needs a proven rock-solid foundation for your next generation of smart products, there’s a Raspberry Pi computer for you.
That’s not all we do.
