ARM, the globally renowned chip designer, has recently made an expensive buy in London-based Apical, an imaging and embedded computer business. Pegged at £242m, ARM aims to branch out from the crawling global smartphone market with its this buy.
Prior to Apical, ARM had also bought Sansa Security, an Israel-based company reportedly for a whopping $75m-$85m.
Explaining its decision to acquire Apical, ARM said the acquisition is a step in the direction of its long-term growth strategy to enable new imaging products for next generation security systems, vehicles, smart building, robotics, industrial and retail application. All of these will require image processing.
Apical’s imaging products are very popular and are currently being used in more than 1.5 billion smartphones and 300 million other industrial/consumer devices including tablets, digital still cameras and IP cameras.
According to figures made public by Apical’s Companies House filing, it has been successful in turning over £16.6m, with pre-tax profits of £8.7m. Apparently, ARM decided to hoover Apical’s business mainly because of its assets.
On the other hand, ARM has also been able to maintain its strong revenue report card in the first quarter of 2016, by registering a whopping 14 percent increase its in revenue to £276m for its first quarter. Further, its Pre-tax profits also rose by a 14 percent to £137.5m.
Apical has around 100 employees, mostly at its R&D centre in Loughborough, United Kingdom.
According to a statement made by ARM’s Simon Segars, “The ARM partnership is solving the technical challenges of next generation products such as driverless cars and sophisticated security systems.”
He further added that, “These solutions rely on the creation of dedicated image computing solutions and Apical’s technologies will play a crucial role in their delivery.” Whether this acquisitions works for ARM is something we will have to wait and watch. Keep checking this space to know more.