Nice regurgitated thoughts from this article:
"ARM is a British firm that has found the industry sweet spot - and therefore has a license to print money,". "Rather than manufacture chips or micro-controllers, the company licenses its technology to hardware firms. To date, it has 600 licenses with more than 200 companies. Besides smartphones, ARM's products are in mobile-payment systems, auto infotainment centers and digital TVs. Trading at $38, ARM recently grew earnings by 31% and has about $500 million in net cash and no debt. It's very expensive on a Price/Earnings (P/E) ratio basis but it avoids all the overhead that comes with manufacturing."