Soaring shipments boost Imagination profits

LONDON – The number of chips that shipped containing graphics and other cores from intellectual property licensor Imagination Technologies Group plc annually almost doubled in the financial year to April 30, causing a jump in revenue and profit.

Partner chip unit shipments were 245 million units in 2011 financial year compared with 126 million units in 2010 FY. The growth was driven by increasing sales of mobile phones, personal media players, TVs, tablets and netbook computers, digital radio, car navigation systems and graphically enabled automobile dashboards, Imagination said.  

Imagination (Kings Langley, England) made a net profit of to £19.3 million (about $30.9 million) on annual revenues of £98.0 million (about $157 million). The net profit was up 36 percent on a year before while the revenue was up 21 percent from £80.9 million (about $130 million).

The full results are based on both technology licensing and a separate digital audio broadcast (DAB) radio equipment business. The later continued to suffer declining sales as the primary U.K. market reaches saturation.

However, the core licensing business more than made up for this. Technology revenues increased 47 percent to £69.8 million (2010: £47.3 million) with royalty revenue up 69 percent and licensing revenue up 24 percent. Pure revenues fell to £28.2 million (2010: £33.6 million). The company includes Apple and Intel among its shareholders and licensees.

Imagination said that its success with graphics is now also creating other core licensing opportunities and the company is seeing a diversification of design wins and growing interest in other IP cores including Meta, Imagination's multithreaded, multicore application processor.

"Our technologies, instrumental in many of the key market trends, continue to gain ground and are powering many market-driving and iconic end-user products," said Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination, in a statement. "With well over 500 million devices across numerous categories having shipped to date, approximately half of this volume during the last financial year alone, we now see a revised target of around one billion units for the annual run-rate for our partners’ chips as a reasonable goal within five years."


Related links and articles:

Imagination reports record half-year

Imagination raises outlook for graphic cores

Imagination rolls embedded cloud services

Imagination ports Android to Meta processor

Imagination buys ray tracing firm for $27 million