Imagination Technologies strengthens its marketing and sales operations

Appoints New Vice President of Marketing

July 10, 2006 -- Imagination Technologies – a leader in System on Chip Intellectual Property – reports that it has strengthened the business development operation of its technology division by separating the sales and marketing activities to give each the level of focus that the company’s growing business demands.

As a result Imagination has, for its technology division, appointed a new Vice President of Marketing and created the role of Vice President of Sales.

Says Hossein Yassaie, Imagination Technologies’ CEO: “Increasingly high levels of global customer interest and engagement mean that our business development teams have become largely devoted to sales and customer relations. These changes, which separate business development into marketing and sales functions, were planned as part of an ongoing process to better deal with the company’s growing customer base and pipeline of opportunities, and provide additional executive-level bandwidth.”

Imagination Technologies has been steadily strengthening its technology sales and marketing in both its head office and Japan, along with the recent formation of US and Taiwanese offices. As part of the ongoing organisational changes David McBrien becomes Vice President of Sales. The company has appointed UK semiconductor industry veteran Tony King-Smith in the newly created position of Vice President of Marketing.

McBrien has an established track record of success for both chip and IP sales and has held management positions at Hitachi and at Parthus. McBrien joined Imagination Technologies in 2002 to run business development for several of the company’s technology groups. In recent years Imagination has achieved significant licensing deals with customers including NEC, Renesas, Intel, Sharp, Texas Instruments, Frontier Silicon, Philips, Samsung, Centrality, Sunplus and Freescale.

King-Smith joins Imagination Technologies from Panasonic, where he was involved in global business and technology development in the consumer, automotive and mobile phone market segments. He has also held senior management positions at Renesas (Hitachi), LSI Logic, Inmos and British Aerospace. He brings to the company extensive experience in segment marketing and further blue chip corporate relationships, as well as a wide network of industry contacts.

“Making marketing a dedicated business group will allow our sales operation to focus on its continuing growth, with further extended presence in APAC planned,” says Yassaie. “Our new Taiwanese and US operations have already established many new opportunities and won significant licensing business. Continuing focus on those regions is a key strategic activity for us.”

After several years of IP licensing and development the company is now seeing large volumes of chips incorporating its IP beginning to ship. Approximately 12m licensing partner devices were shipped in FY2005/6, compared to 2.5m in 2005, and partner design wins were up 43% to 40 SoCs to date. 13 such devices are now shipping from Imagination’s licensing partners.

Imagination Technologies in the Market
In mobile graphics Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR MBX technology leads the market, and has been licensed to six of the top 10 semiconductor companies. The new generation PowerVR SGX has already been licensed to three of that top 10. PowerVR technology can now be found in advanced phones from NEC, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sony-Ericsson, Sharp, Motorola, SK Teletech and others.

In the DAB digital radio market the company’s IP has an 80% market share, via licensing partner Frontier Silicon. Imagination’s PURE Digital brand is the number one supplier of DAB radios.

Imagination was one of the first companies with technology shipping in to the T-DMB market, via handset manufacturer Samsung, and its new mobile TV IP platforms uniquely support multiple broadcast standards including DVB-H, ISDB-T, T-DMB and DAB-IP via the company’s UCC software defined radio technology.

Imagination is establishing a leading position in the 3D-car navigation market, where it now has a number of licensing partners, and in TV, where it is working with lead partner Sharp.

Imagination’s portfolio of licensable technology includes PowerVR, the leading embedded graphics, video codecs and display cores; UCC, a programmable multi-standard broadcast demodulation solution; and the META and MTX embedded processor cores, which enable highly cost-effective and solution centric SoCs.

About Imagination Technologies
Imagination Technologies Group plc – a leader in SoC IP – develops, licenses and supplies market-leading graphics, video and display cores, real-time multi-threaded DSP/RISC processors and communication and broadcast technologies for the mobile, consumer, automotive and PC markets. It supplies licensable IP (Intellectual Property) supported by advanced development tools to leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies worldwide. Imagination Technologies Group plc has its corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom and is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange (FTSE:IMG). See: www.imgtec.com