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British graphics processing and AI company Imagination Technologies is reportedly up for sale by its current owner, Canyon Bridge Capital Partners. According to A Bloomberg According to the report, Canyon Bridge has hired financial advisory and asset management firm Lazard Inc. To find a buyer, the latter has already received some inquiries about the company. The private equity fund hopes to recoup £550 million (about $690 million today) from the investment it made to buy the chip maker in 2017.
Imagination peaked in 2012, in value terms, when it was worth around £2bn. However, it put itself up for sale about five years later, after one of its largest partners, Apple, said it would stop using the company’s graphics chips in the iPhone and its other products by 2019. That’s when Canyon Bridge acquired the company at a discount. It is now offering it for sale after eight years, that is, about the end of its specified period.
Although it no longer sells its chips to Apple, Imagination still has some high-profile customers, such as Texas Instruments and MediaTek, which primarily use Imagination’s technology for in-car chips. Google He is also said to be a client of Imagination, helping it build the Android GPU Inspector tool. However, a research paper published in December by British-China Transparency, a charitable organisation, confirms this Chinese companies have stolen Imagination Technologies’ intellectual property To promote the development of domestic chips.
According to the UKCT report (PDF), Canyon Bridge is supported by China’s state-owned repair fund management. It is accused of allowing some of Imagination’s core assets to be transferred to Chinese chipmakers Moore Threads, Innosilicon and Biren Technology. It was also widely reported that China Reform attempted to take over management of Imagination in 2020 through an emergency board meeting. This meeting was supposed to be set to appoint four nominees by the Chinese Fund as directors, but was canceled after receiving significant backlash from the British government and the public.
However, Imagination has denied any wrongdoing, and the company said it has always complied with regulations and adhered to industry standards. She also said that it would not make any sense at all for the company to sell its core expertise and allow its customers to build their own GPUs. But whatever the case, Canyon Bridge believes it can sell Imagination Technologies for a significant amount. The former believes that Nvidia’s massive increase in market cap could also translate into strong interest in Imagination Technologies.
