Imagination to Cut Another 200 Jobs in Restructuring

Imagination Technologies is cutting another 200 jobs as officials accelerate the restructuring of the company that they first announced in February.

The company, which supplies graphics chips to mobile device makers like Apple and has been trying to expand its reach into such areas as wearable devices and the data center, also will shed or shut down non-core units as it looks to save almost $40 million in expenses by the end of its next fiscal year, which runs through April 2017.

Officials said the restructuring will enable the company to streamline its finances and focus on its three core businesses: PowerVR GPUs for graphics and multimedia applications, MIPS for compute processing and Ensigma for connectivity. Imagination will not reduce investment or headcount in any of those areas, officials said.

“This swift and decisive action will put us back on a sound financial footing and will enable us to have the necessary resources to further strengthen our three core businesses,” interim CEO Andrew Heath said in a statement. “They are unaffected by these cuts.”

The company on Feb. 8 announced the restructuring after taking an operating loss for the year. In addition, Hossein Yassaie resigned after 18 years as the company’s CEO. At the time, officials also announced 150 job cuts; combined with the new losses, the company will cut 350 jobs. It has more than 1,700 employees worldwide.

However, Imagination officials did say they are looking to fill 50 positions in relation to its PowerVR business, which they said is a strength. In addition, they said that its MIPS business is strong in such areas as networking, set-top boxes and embedded processing, and that Ensigma is doing well in such areas as low-energy WiFi and Bluetooth.

At the Game Developer Conference this week, Imagination unveiled the latest version of its PowerVR Graphics software development kit (SDK).

The non-core areas that Imagination is targeting to shed are related to its Pure consumer digital radio business. The company last month announced it was looking to sell Pure, and said March 17 that it is seeing “considerable interest” in the business.

Imagination relies heavily on Apple’s iPhones and iPads for its revenue, and has been hurt by the slowing sales of the smartphone. Apple in January said that iPhone sales, at about 75 million units, were flat from the same period the previous year. Imagination for several years has worked to reduce its reliance on the Apple products by trying to expand into growth areas like wearable devices and data center systems. In 2012, the company paid $100 million for the MIPS processor technology.