Imagination Technologies Share Discussion Threads

[mark4231] 31/10/2017 11:50

I lost my nerve yesterday and bailed out of my relatively small holding. Kind of hoping the takeover fails so I can buy back in at a lower price.

[dealy] 31/10/2017 11:21

No news yet?

[dealy] 31/10/2017 07:32

Thanks for that Kamitora. This plus a bit of nerves might create a buying opportunity at the open.

[borromini1] 30/10/2017 23:28

What happened between 22 May 2017 and 16 June and 22 June 2017 ...

Tsinghau University rebought 3% holding similar to their holding last year.
Heading towards a key shareholding on the scale of Apple and Intel in the past.
Joining in with existing shareholders in support of the company. No additional payments to management or employees involved.

25 days latter sudden reversal of policy by Tsinghau University, all shares on the way to being sold.

6 days later IMG announce start of sale of whole group resulting in Canyon Bridge, a closed fund, with sole funding via the Chinese state, making the only bid. Out of the £550m bid £30m has been allocated to payments to management and employees. Most shareholders loose money. Management preferred option.

[dealy] 30/10/2017 19:11

I'm out at 180. Made some good money here buying at 120p. You never know what tomorrow brings

[srsm] 30/10/2017 17:21

I'd forgotten all about Ray Tracing. Gawd all mighty.
The best 2D/3D/Video Processing for mobile + vast potential of Ray Tracing + Neural Network device 5 times faster than Apples. And that's the entry level.

Thrown away at a bargain bin price.

[winsome3] 30/10/2017 12:40

Our ray tracing technology is of interest in the gaming market and PowerVR is continuing to develop its ecosystem with notable games publishers and middleware/engine providers

Looking back I noticed the vast space around this important technology item which should have huge margins because with this technology the games developers dont have to try and match surface colours and rendering employing small armies of colourists. Thats a huge saving in manpower and an opportunity to replace their costs with our profits a win win

[winsome3] 30/10/2017 12:23

What the cChinese state operated fund is going to do to IMG and its employees should be apparent to the employees although I very much doubt that.

I expect the chinese to copy and transfer a copy of absolutely everything to China at the same time duplicating in china the entire layout desks task jobs and then have a man sitting next to everyone to learn what is not written down.

Then after a time further development would be done in China to save costs until finally those that betrayed or engineered the sell out will be left in charge of an empty ship. A new Chairman awarding excessive shares to themselves for betraying those UK shareholders that have stuck through the decades and paying off the employees for their silence.

Apple will then have to try to portray that their lured and captured IMG employees in St Albans can get around the patents and risk the chinese giant stopping shipping and sale of the iphone across europe and the world including china.

Choose a China friendly court and then see what happens as Chinese companies are favoured and one of the few difficult to reverse engineer high tech high margin products slides away to China and undermines the military and western lead in silicon and graphics chips.

[winsome3] 30/10/2017 10:05

The Chief Executive would not say what the increase in royaltys requested from Apple would be. (clearly it must be a significant increase as otherwise they would not try to replicate 25 years of specific experiience in graphic processing.
The questioner asked was it a 100% or more increase.
His only reply was that the existing apple royaltys were the same going forwards(that implies new chip sets and new royaltys are different of course). I am sure Apple would try to frustrate similar amounts of large IP costs going to what had been a clever lapdog of a UK PLC to be exploited.
$10 dollars per set implies massive price increases and massive amonts of 100% profit new income. Only Yossaies attitude to having money held us back as IMO he didnt like holding and having money.

[adventurous] 30/10/2017 09:53

I guess those hedge funds short on IMG, particularly the most recent new game player, with just over 2% the day the MIPS sale went through - really need any reason they can find to depress the price!!! What will they come up with to make a few million ;-)

[winsome3] 30/10/2017 09:42

Equiniti the registrars are on notice to update all the beneficial shareholders as two shareholdings of ones for whom I was a proxy did not come up when I went to the AGM!!!
This is fact.

I also did not receive the paper copy notifications for my own named shareholding.

Equniti have failed in their job and the Chairman didn't have a clue as to the number of private shareholders or their total holdings.

The cut of the register should of been cut three working days before the AGM.

Due process has not been followed and this feels like a scam takeover that needs a review by Minister Greg Hands MP or the other ministers.

The Chairman seems on its who the shareholders are shareholders to be trying the hear no evil see no evil and given the £30mill slush fund of shares "yet to be determined" where they go etc or more in other worlds that would be blackmail or bribery.

Jefferies have form for this with Torex Retail PLC.

The Company Secretary and Chairman should of by now issued to the Registrar Equiniti to do beneficial shareholder requests to every single nominee and requiring those nominees to request below to further nominees below them. Including those individuals named.

The respoonse should all be back electronically within 4 days.

[srsm] 30/10/2017 08:48

To me the most important thing for IMG is how much stuff will they sell over the next few years. I don't really care about who's on a shareholder register (sorry). They should have been pinned down on the REAL value of their Tech as part of a bigger group. I think the board barely understand the Neural Network technology and its importance. When Hossein Yassaie proposed 3D for mobile he was probably considered mad. Why would anyone need it!

10cents, 20cents, 40-50 cents per unit. It simply isn't enough. It doesn't reflect the cost of development and doesn't come close to rewarding the value IMG IP adds to something that retails for £500 to £1000 (gasp). I believe Microsoft get about $30+ per £500 to £1000 PC. Intel charge about 80$ to $250 dollars for a CPU for a £500 to £1000 PC. Much of which goes to the manufacturing arm. But does the IP Development side of the Intel business get 50 cents revenue? I suspect it is $10 to $100 depending on the processor.

2D, 3D and Video processing provided by IMG IP is the heart of a smartphone. But IMG get the dregs compared to WIntel.

And that won't change. So being part of a larger group is probably necessary. Just not at this firesale price. IMG NN could be as important as anything ARM do but for about 2.6% of the price.


Some people can see the future, some fight the last war. I think we've just lost the last war.

And so many shareholders are putting out the joint UK/China Bunting.

[borromini1] 30/10/2017 08:21

SRSM - some reasons why the great potential of the Neural Network Accelerator products were not mentioned at the AGM ...
1) NO formal or informal presentation on anything by the board, the management did not deem the business owners merited the time and effort.
2) During the AGM the chairman, Peter Hill, suddenly became very concerned with the idea, not bourne out, that attendees wanted to leave and rush off, so became determined to cut discussion and questioning short and close the meeting.

Maybe Tuesdays meeting will address the issue, I hope as many of you can get there as possible.

[adventurous] 30/10/2017 07:48

Notice of the Court Meeting and Imagination General Meeting

As described in the Scheme Document, to become effective the Scheme requires, amongst other things, the approval of a majority in number of the Scheme Shareholders present and voting (either in person or by proxy) at the Court Meeting representing not less than 75 per cent. in value of the relevant Scheme Shares voted, and the passing of the Special Resolution. The Scheme must also be sanctioned by the Court. The Scheme is also subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the Conditions and further terms that are set out in the Scheme Document.

Notices of the Court Meeting and the Imagination General Meeting, which will be held at Clifford Chance LLP, 10 Upper Bank St, Canary Wharf, London E14 5JJ on 31 October 2017, are set out in the Scheme Document. The Court Meeting will commence at 9.00 a.m. and the Imagination General Meeting at 9.15 a.m. (or, if later, as soon as the Court Meeting has concluded or been adjourned).

[borromini1] 30/10/2017 07:25

Dealy - the business owners could easily have been given the final say with a vote on both totally related sale offers, MIPS and IMG, which are two sides of the same single minded strategy being persued by the board. The board denied that obvious opportunity hoping to deflect one bad deal from adversely effecting the other. In what seems more akin to subterfuge they delayed the date of the AGM to a later date than any previous year in order to avoid any possible questioning until the day after the MIPS sale.

[borromini1] 29/10/2017 20:32

Dealy - you are absolutely right the large shareholders take a lot of the responsibility for the outcome of the vote in relation to all the business owners. But the lack of shareholder representation on this board makes the situation much worse. The bad MIPS deal, not waiting for iPhone 8 + X royalties confirmation, not waiting for the impact of the market leading Neural Network Accelerator, breaking up the integrated product set by selling off MIPS, the low valuation and rushed sale process, the likelyhood of being net debt free this year, the success of the XE products, the fact that unlike the board and employees most shareholders are going to lose money by this deal, these are all factors pointing to the rejection of offer.

For shareholders the more detail revealed the more voting for the offer looks like turkeys voting for Christmas.

[dealy] 29/10/2017 18:45

I think the board is right to give shareholders the opportunity to accept the 182p offer so that meant getting rid of a smaller subsidiary at a fire sale price. There is a real option on the table on Tuesday (with no contingencies ). Now it's a straight stick or bail decision for the large shareholders

[borromini1] 29/10/2017 17:59

From the AGM it became clear the the rushed sale of MIPS has been disastrous for the sale price. The board have given away MIPS at a 50% discount on the board's estimated (they didn't know the figure) total cost of ownership to date of 100+ million GBP (cost of purchase plus R+D minus revenue etc.). Just when MIPS is expected to start making a profit this financial year, they go and sell it at a massive discount. What a bad deal. IMG are only getting 15m GBP now and the company getting the bargain have also been given extended credit for 6 months over which to pay the remaining 35m GBP. Not a good deal for shareholders. No wonder the board did everything they could to avoid a shareholder vote on that deal.

[dealy] 29/10/2017 17:58

Not all offers get approved. It's up to the large shareholders to decide if they want to stick or bail

[jamesrowe] 29/10/2017 17:12

CB seems keen to buy IMG so it wouldn't surprise me if they upped their offer by 10% if they were just under the required 75% and thought that would swing some shareholders. I don't think it will come to that though, I expect most shareholders to have voted in favour.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple came in with a very low offer to settle with no admission of liability at the very last minute as they did this recently with another company. The pressure would be on the IMG directors to settle for something for the shareholders, even if lower than they want, rather than them get nothing and Apple would get rid of a lawsuit and any potential thrreat to the sale of iPhones in China.

[borromini1] 29/10/2017 10:44

SRSM + Dealy - Exactly ... IMG shareholders could be missing out big time on similar growth to Nvidia ...

Nvidia's main focus over the last few years has produced considerable success using GPU's in data centres, the cloud and elsewhere for AI and Neural Networks. Over the same period Nvidia's share price has increased by a factor of 10 times, from 20 to over 200 dollars today. Market capitalisation from 12 billion USD to over 120 billion.

[dealy] 29/10/2017 09:32

Possible outcome here is the deal doesn't get approved by shareholders causing a short term drop to 150p which will be a huge chance to get back in for the long term

[jamesrowe] 28/10/2017 14:29

I just spotted that Alpine Associates Management Inc. increased their short position by 0.68% to over 2% on 26th Oct. Either they know something that we don't or they are desperate to lose a pile of money!

Total short positions now stand at around 7%.

[srsm] 28/10/2017 13:45

And the board and private investors missed the elephant in the room.

"Neural Networks (NNs) drive an explosion in technological progress across industries, NNAs are now a fundamental class of processors, likely to be as significant as CPUs and GPUs."
hxxps://www.imgtec.com/powervr-2nx-neural-network-accelerator/

IMG are giving away a technology likely to be as important as anything MIPS and ARM does, and as important as PowerVR.

Buy One (PowerVR) and Get One Free (PowerVR Series2NX Neural Network Accelerator (NNA) ).

To paraphrase Norman Tebbit. The CPU isn't dead: the CPU is brain dead.

(2nd page has the interesting bits).

More here:
hxxps://www.imgtec.com/blog/why-the-powervr-2nx-nna-is-the-future-of-neural-net-acceleration/
Note the dig at Apple.

"Recently a smartphone manufacturer announced that its hardware used to enable face detection for unlocking the phone offered 600 billion operations per second. A single core of our initial PowerVR 2NX IP, running at a conservative 800MHz, can offer up to 2048 MACs/cycle (the industry standard performance indicator), meaning we can run over 3.2 trillion operations a second – twice our nearest competitor. The 2NX is a highly scalable solution, and through the use of multiple cores, much higher performance can be achieved, if required. As they say in football, it’s men against boys."


More sighs. I think 182 without the 2NX is probably fair enough. With it I think it is a disastrous undervaluation.

Machine Learning - Neural Networks is the future. And maybe what the Chinese are really after.