Raspberry Pi started selling its tiny, inexpensive computers in 2012, originally becoming famous among students, programmers and electronics enthusiasts. Since then, more than 77m units have been sold, and the business has expanded into industrial equipment, embedded computing and semiconductors.
That evolution was already well under way when the company floated in London in June 2024 for £172.9m. Two years later the underlying business looks considerably larger. In the six months to June, revenue jumped 90% to $256.9m. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3m. Pre-tax profit rose 216% to $19.6m, while adjusted earnings per share almost tripled to 13.9 cents.
The headline revenue number slightly exaggerates the rate of underlying expansion. Total unit shipments increased by a still healthy 17%, to 4.2m. Much of the remaining growth came from higher selling prices, particularly as Raspberry Pi passed rising memory costs on to customers and sold more expensive, higher-memory products. Its average selling price per board rose 42%. Sales of the Pi 4 and Pi 5 increased 69% and 47% respectively.
Industrial customers are becoming increasingly important. Raspberry Pi says it is seeing particularly strong demand in smart-home products and aerospace and defence. Its machines, once best known as cheap computers for learning to code, are increasingly being incorporated directly into commercial products.
A very profitable stockpile
The most unusual feature of the half-year results sits not in demand but in Raspberry Pi's warehouses. Memory chips have become considerably more expensive as suppliers allocate manufacturing capacity towards the booming market for AI data centres. Raspberry Pi anticipated tighter supply and accumulated memory inventory in 2025, when prices were lower. It was therefore able to sell products in early 2026 at prices reflecting today's more expensive components while, for a while, using chips bought at yesterday's lower prices.
The effect was substantial. Gross profit per board jumped 53%, from $8 to $12.20. Yet the company's overall gross margin actually slipped from 25% to 23%, because the pass-through of expensive memory inflated revenue as well as costs.
However, the company says the lower-cost stock accumulated in 2025 has now been largely consumed and that current inventory costs are close to market prices. Management therefore expects the unusually strong unit economics of the first half to moderate in the second.
Jefferies reaches much the same conclusion. According to the estimates supplied with the results, the broker raised its full-year forecasts to 8.8m boards, $655m of revenue and $64m of adjusted EBITDA, but expects profitability to be weaker in the second half because roughly $15m of the first-half benefit came from using cheaper memory purchased previously.
Management expects shipment volumes in H2 to exceed those of the first six months, supported by the 2.6m-unit backlog and additional manufacturing capacity being installed with Sony. It also now expects full-year EBITDA to exceed the market consensus that existed before the results.
Growth has a price
MarketScreener's estimates put Raspberry Pi at roughly 61 times forecast 2026 earnings, 28 times enterprise value to EBITDA and 2.7 times enterprise value to sales. Those multiples are considerably higher than they were on 2025 numbers, when the shares traded at about 37 times earnings and 16 times EBITDA.
The results show that Raspberry Pi has travelled a long way from the $35 educational computer that made its name. The next test is more conventional for a listed technology company: turning rapid sales growth into repeatable profits once the accounting tailwinds become less helpful.
