Affordable computer maker Raspberry Pi said it was “more profitable than expected” in the first half of the year when it became one of the few high profile new listings on the London Stock Exchange in 2024.
The Cambridge based firm, which raised £178.9 million through its IPO in June and was added to the FTSE 250 on Monday this week, said it made gross profit of $34.2 million (£25.6 million) up 47% in the six months to end June.
The company said that while overall volumes were slightly lower than expected it had sold more higher margin models.
CEO Eben Upton said: “The IPO was the watershed moment of the first half, with admission to trading just two weeks before the period end.
“In continued pleasing trading in the first half, we saw strong uptake of our latest flagship SBC, Raspberry Pi5, the launch of the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, and the successful ramp to production of RP2350, our second-generation microcontroller platform. The higher than usual customer and channel inventory levels which were evident at the time of the IPO have continued to unwind, and there is a growing sense that this will have concluded by the year end.
“We have an extraordinary team, a world class product set backed up by an exciting future roadmap, and a loyal and engaged customer base that we can continue to grow. In the second half, we have further planned product releases and a number of initiatives to further expand our engagement within our industrial and embedded market”.
Revenue was up 61% at $144 million and pre-tax profit was ;little changed at £10.8 million. The company said the recovery from supply chain glitches seen after the pandemic “with almost all single board computers (SBCs) and compute module products freely available in channel.”
The biggest product launch of the past year, the Raspberry Pi5, sold 1.1m units in the first half following its introduction at the end of October 2023.
Other innovations have included the launch of a first-party AI hardware product, the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, in collaboration with Hailo and the debut of a cloud connectivity product, Raspberry Pi Connect, which has notched up 50,000 users since launch in May 2024.
The company expected the new product launches to boost unit volumes in the second half.
Dr. David Ramm, partner in the corporate team at law firm Crowell & Moring said “It is not clearthat the Raspberry Pi float represents a change in mood toward listing in London.There are still fundamental problems facing the LSE and, more particularly, AIM, but it does represent a significant piece of good news in a period that has been predominantly bad.
