Nordic Semiconductor Posts Record Q2 Revenue as IoT Wireless Chips Carry the Company Past $219 Million
Nordic Semiconductor reported its best-ever quarter on August 6, with revenue climbing 33 percent year over year to $219 million as demand for low-power wireless chips and cloud services kept climbing across consumer, industrial, and healthcare markets. The Oslo-based company, whose radios sit inside everything from fitness bands and smart meters to medical monitors and industrial sensors, said the second quarter marked the fifth straight period of year-over-year growth. Gross margin widened to 53.1 percent from 50.7 percent a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA jumped 75 percent to $36 million.
Chief Executive Vegard Wollan said the growth was broad across product lines and end markets, with industrial demand especially strong in cellular and long-range applications. The company beat analyst expectations of roughly $208.7 million in revenue for the quarter, and raised the bar for the third quarter with guidance of $220 million to $240 million.
For the first half of 2026, revenue reached $411 million, up 28.8 percent from the same period a year ago. Operating profit almost doubled to $32.4 million, while net profit rose to $27.1 million from $11.3 million in the first half of 2025. Nordic's stock barely moved on the news, holding around $166, as investors weighed strong execution against a price-to-earnings ratio near 170.
Short-range chips stay the main engine
Short-range connectivity remains the center of the business. That group, which includes Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, Zigbee, and the Matter protocol that binds smart home gear together, generated $199.8 million in the quarter, up 29.5 percent. Bluetooth certification data shows Nordic holding a 31 percent share of new Bluetooth Low Energy end-product certifications over the past year, about three times its nearest rival.
Consumer products accounted for $125.2 million of revenue, a 24.9 percent increase and 57 percent of the total. Those chips show up in earbuds, fitness trackers, smart watches, and a wide field of accessories that pair to phones over wireless links. The company counts virtually every major phone maker, wearable brand, and audio accessory house among its customers, which gives it a revenue base that is far wider than any single device category.
The company says newer designs are pulling their weight. The nRF54 series of chips, built for the low-power market, is gaining traction, and the nRF9151 and the newer nRF92 series are finding slots in cellular devices. Management repeated its long-term target of average annual revenue growth above 20 percent, and pointed to a rolling twelve-month revenue figure of $759 million, up 21 percent from a year ago. Gross profit for the quarter came to $116 million, against $83 million in the same period last year.
Industrial and healthcare outpace the consumer side
Industrial and healthcare revenue grew 45.5 percent year over year to $86.1 million, and now represent about 40 percent of total sales. Wollan said industrial demand was especially strong in cellular and long-range applications, and company officials pointed to demand from both large established clients and a broader base of small and mid-sized customers. The other revenue line, which includes power-management chips and development kits, nearly doubled to $4 million during the quarter.
The industrial story matters as IoT matures because these devices run for years and need reliable links between sensors, machines, and cloud platforms. Nordic's chips appear in smart meters, building automation, asset trackers, and medical devices, with manufacturers choosing low-power parts that can survive on a coin cell for months. Nordic executives pointed to continued investment in the long-range lineup, which includes cellular products and the nRF Cloud service, and the company has said that business could scale past $100 million a year later this decade if current trends hold. Long-range revenue, from a small base of $8 million a year ago, nearly doubled to $15 million in the quarter.
Cash flow is healthy enough to fund the push. The company ended the quarter with $276 million in cash plus an unused $200 million credit facility. It spent $8 million on capital expenditure in Q2, and operating cash flow came in at $15 million. Management said a deliberate front-end inventory build, ahead of expected demand, explains most of the modest dip in the cash balance from $280 million.
A chip-to-cloud platform instead of a component sale
Nordic's strategy no longer stops at the silicon. During the quarter, the company expanded nRF Cloud with remote battery health monitoring and fuel gauge functions, letting device makers check the state of deployed hardware without pulling it from the field. It also switched on firmware vulnerability scanning, a feature that flags software risks and helps customers prepare for rules such as the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act, which tightens security duties on connected products.
The shift reflects a wider change in the industry. Connected products now need updates, diagnostics, and lifecycle management, not just a radio chip. Nordic can now bundle hardware, development kits, and software, adding recurring revenue lines that did not exist in pure chip sales. It recently bought Memfault, a startup that lets device makers monitor fleets of connected products in the field, and cloud services are becoming a bigger contributor to margin.
AI tools for embedded developers
The company also used the quarter to roll out AI-assisted development tools, with the aim of pulling product prototypes from months to weeks. Those tools run against Nordic's software development kits, technical documentation, and its large community of embedded developers, offering guided debugging, optimization suggestions, and more reliable code generation.
Management said adoption of the tools is helping a broader group of customers ship faster, which executives hope will raise design activity over the next few quarters. Engineering teams at hundreds of small companies typically order evaluation boards, write firmware, and then commit to a chip over a series of hardware revisions. A faster loop can move those design wins from months to weeks. The company says back-end test capacity is being expanded by 40 to 50 percent to keep supply ahead of demand.
What the quarter signals for the IoT market
Wireless chips are the workhorses of the smart home, wearables, smart metering, and industrial sensing, and the sector went through a sharp inventory correction after 2021. Nordic's numbers add to a wider pattern of wireless connectivity chip companies returning to growth by 2025, with newer chip generations, broader customer bases, and service revenue changing how they sell.
The growth is not uniform. The Wi-Fi segment remains soft, management said, and the company faces competition in China. Capacity constraints on some power-management chips are also a watch point. Nordic expects to fill the Wi-Fi gap with its own nRF71 series, which is expected to launch toward the end of the year.
The bigger picture
IoT's rebound here is a stronger signal than consumer gadget sales alone would suggest. The chips are now sold as platforms, bundled with software, clouds, and security compliance tools. It also shows how the smarter chipmakers are shifting the sector's value: companies that manage an entire device lifecycle, as Nordic does with battery health monitoring, firmware scanning, and app updates, matter more than those that only ship components.
Wollan said the performance reflects solid execution, and the company remains on track with its long-term targets. The muted reaction in the stock is a reminder that headwinds remain. For a chipmaker that reached record revenue on the strength of the broad market, the next few quarters look like the payoff of a design cycle that brought dozens of new customers into its base.
One thing is clear for the small, connected objects that fill homes and factories: the radios inside them will stay a competitive field, and Oslo's wireless specialist just raised its own bar.
Read more IoT coverage and follow developments in wireless chips on The Verge's hardware section. Nordic Semiconductor's official Q2 2026 report contains the full financials, and the Investing.com summary has the numbers in a condensed form.