Twelve years of hardware, software and community
A dozen years of chips, code and a huge user base would be slow and costly to copy.
Raspberry Pi Holdings plc: The £40 Computer Inside Other People's Machines
Raspberry Pi designs tiny, cheap, low-power computers that hobbyists tinker with and factories build into vending machines, medical devices and industrial kit.
LSE:RPI
$607.00-4.48%
Updated: Aug 12, 2026
Technology
smalluk
Bull & Bear Case
An overview of the main reasons to invest and the key risks involved.
Bull Case
Designs its own silicon and software in-house
Owning the chip design and the operating system keeps costs down and supply under its control.
Millions of tinkerers become paying engineers
Engineers who learn on the boards at home specify them later at work, seeding company orders.
Bear Case
Cheap boards make hardware margins thin
Selling low-cost computers leaves little room per unit if component prices rise.
Manufacturers can drop the board next redesign
Company customers may switch to a rival module whenever they refresh a product.
Chip supply and a concentrated manufacturing base
Boards depend on outside chip fabrication and a narrow set of factories to build them.
Executive Summary
About Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi designs small, inexpensive, low-power computers, plus the chips and software that run them. Most are sold through resellers and licensed manufacturers rather than direct, and more than 67 million units have shipped since launch. Hobbyists buy them to build things; companies design them into vending machines, factory controllers and medical equipment.
The case rests on how hard that position would be to rebuild: twelve years of hardware, software and a global following, with Arm and Sony as both shareholders and technology partners. The debate is whether cheap hardware can hold its margins, and whether manufacturers stay loyal at the next product redesign.
The case rests on how hard that position would be to rebuild: twelve years of hardware, software and a global following, with Arm and Sony as both shareholders and technology partners. The debate is whether cheap hardware can hold its margins, and whether manufacturers stay loyal at the next product redesign.
Investment Thesis
Overview of buy and sell case of the business.
Why Invest?
Key pieces of information about the business that you need to know about.
Twelve years of hardware, software and community
Raspberry Pi has spent over a decade building three things at once: the boards themselves, the free operating system and tools that run on them, and the documentation and tutorials engineers rely on. Around that sits a worldwide following in the millions, sharing projects and answers online. A rival could copy the board, which is the easy part, but not the years of software support or the community that makes the boards easy to work with. Competing single-board computers from Asian manufacturers and Arduino-style boards exist, yet none carries the same combined package.
Designs its own silicon and software in-house
The company handles the whole chain itself: designing chip building blocks, developing the operating system, writing the engineering support that helps customers get products working, and running the community. It designs its own microcontroller chips rather than buying every part in. Owning those layers means it controls what goes into each board and can commit to keeping products available for years, a promise industrial customers need when their own product might sell for a decade. Outsourced-hardware rivals cannot make that commitment as credibly.
Millions of tinkerers become paying engineers
The unusual part of the model is how customers arrive. Professional design engineers meet Raspberry Pi at home, on hobby projects, then specify the same boards at work because they already know how they behave. That turns an enthusiast base into a free sales channel into industry, and the company reports over 1,300 active relationships with manufacturers building the boards into their products, alongside 100-plus resellers across roughly 75 countries. Marketing spend cannot easily manufacture that kind of familiarity.
Catalysts
The key events that could drive investment opportunities and shift markets.
New Board Launches: The next stretch is mostly about widening the catalogue and pushing further into industrial customers. Raspberry Pi releases new computers and add-on boards regularly, and each launch can pull existing customers up to higher-priced models.
Reseller Expansion: The company continues to add Approved Resellers to a network already covering dozens of countries. More local distribution can shorten lead times for smaller manufacturers and open markets the direct sales team does not reach.
OEM Design Wins: Management is investing in relationships with product manufacturers, where a single design win can lock in years of repeat orders. A higher public profile since listing is being used to open doors at larger potential customers.
Own-Silicon Roadmap: Raspberry Pi designs its own microcontroller chips and chip building blocks. Further in-house silicon could lower the bill of materials on future boards and reduce reliance on third-party processors.
Industrial Market Share: The company targets a total addressable market it puts at around $21 billion across industrial, embedded, enthusiast and education computing. Taking a larger slice of the industrial portion would shift the revenue mix towards longer-life, higher-volume contracts.
Partner Technology Access: Arm and Sony are both shareholders and technology partners. Deeper access to their chip designs and manufacturing could support a product roadmap that a company of this size could not otherwise fund.
Key Risks
Key pieces of information about the business risks that you need to know about.
Cheap boards make hardware margins thin
The proposition is low-cost computing, which caps what any board can be sold for. Most of the cost sits in memory, processors and other bought-in components, so when those prices rise the company either absorbs the hit or raises prices and undermines the pitch. Hardware businesses at this price point have far less cushion than software businesses when input costs move against them.
Manufacturers can drop the board next redesign
Industrial customers designing a Raspberry Pi into a vending machine or a controller generate years of repeat orders, which is the attraction. The flip side is that loyalty resets whenever they redesign the product. Competing modules from other suppliers can be substituted at that point, and a handful of large customers choosing differently would show up in volumes without much warning.
Chip supply and a concentrated manufacturing base
Raspberry Pi designs chips but does not own factories, so it depends on outside semiconductor manufacturing and on a narrow set of assembly partners, including licensed production arrangements. Shortages of components have disrupted the wider electronics industry before and constrained what the company could ship. Any repeat would limit output regardless of how strong demand is.
Follow the Experts
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Investor Materials
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Key Documents
Raspberry Pi Holdings plc - Annual Report 2025
PDFRaspberry Pi Holdings plc - Final results 2025
PDFTeam
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What the Pros are asking
Here are the questions that professional investors are asking before making an investment decision.
Who actually buys these things, hobbyists or businesses?
Both, and the split matters more than the total. Enthusiasts, students and makers buy single boards to build projects, while companies buy in volume to put inside their own products, such as digital signs, factory controllers and vending machines. The industrial and embedded side is where repeat, multi-year ordering comes from, because a manufacturer that designs a board into a product keeps buying it for that product's life. The hobbyist side is smaller in volume but feeds the industrial side with engineers who already know the platform.
If the boards are so cheap, where does the profit come from?
Profit comes from volume, from selling more expensive boards over time, and from owning the design rather than the factory. Raspberry Pi designs the hardware and chips, then relies on manufacturing partners and licensees to build them, so it avoids owning plants. It also sells add-on boards, cameras and its own microcontroller chips alongside the main computers. Each unit is low-priced, so the model needs scale and a steady mix shift towards higher-specification products to make the economics work.
What stops a Chinese manufacturer copying it for less?
Cheaper lookalike boards already exist, and copying the hardware is the straightforward part. What is harder to replicate is the software stack, the documentation, the engineering support and the community of users who answer each other's questions, all built over more than a decade. Industrial customers also want a written commitment that a board will still be available years from now, which small copycat suppliers rarely offer. Those commitments and that support ecosystem are the real barrier rather than the circuit board itself.
Why do Arm and Sony matter to a company this small?
Arm and Sony are both shareholders and technology partners, which gives Raspberry Pi access it could not otherwise afford. Arm designs the processor architecture that the boards and chips are built around, so a close relationship helps with roadmap planning. Sony provides manufacturing capability. For a company of this size, having those partners anchored as investors reduces the risk that a key supplier relationship changes on unfavourable terms, though it does not eliminate the underlying dependence on outside chip fabrication.
Is the education mission a distraction from making money?
The two are more aligned than they look, though the tension is real. The original goal was getting cheap computers into the hands of learners, and that produced a generation of engineers familiar with the platform, which is precisely why companies now specify it. Education keeps the community growing and the brand trusted. The honest risk is that the low-price commitment which serves the mission also limits what can be charged, so mission and margin pull in different directions on pricing.