The deal with Canyon Bridge values Imagination at $550m, about 25% of its worth before it started running into difficulties a couple of years ago. While those problems saw long term CEO Sir Hossein Yassaie thrown overboard, Apple compounded the agony more recently when it announced that it wasn’t going to use Imagination’s PowerVR technology in future phones.
It’s a problem for IP companies; when you don’t sign licenses, there’s no revenue down the road. Perhaps Imagination’s new owners can see opportunities amongst those developing smartphones for the Asian market. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t Imagination have been pursuing them?
What now for Imagination? Looking perhaps to assuage the various financial watchdogs, there has been a commitment to maintaining the UK operation and investing in it. Fair enough. But it seems as though quite a few of the important people jumped ship a few months ago and went to work for Apple.
Meanwhile, quite what Tallwood intends to do with MIPS remains to be seen. Most applications for MCU IP – Imagination has never built MCUs – are dominated by ARM and by x86 cores.
How quickly fortunes can turn.
