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The reason they're successful today is simply because they have superior technology in an area (power consumption) that is important for a quickly growing mobile markets.

But lets not forget ARM has been successful for a long time in this space. It's not like when the iPhone came out then ARM started selling. From Wikipedia,

"ARM licensed about 1.6 billion cores in 2005. In 2005, about 1 billion ARM cores went into mobile phones.As of January 2008, over 10 billion ARM cores have been built, and in 2008 iSuppli predicted that by 2011, 5 billion ARM cores will be shipping per year.[8] As of January 2011, ARM states that over 15 billion ARM processors have shipped."

So two years before the iPhone they were licensing more than a billion cores per year. That's more cores than Intel sold this year, five years later.

ARM is more high profile now though because smartphones are more high profile, but ARM has been doing this for a while now.

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