Prelude earns a handsome payback on FillFactory - Archive - Venture Capital - Business Weekly

HOME

Archive

Venture Capital Archive

Prelude earns a handsome payback on FillFactory

Written by Business Weekly

Tuesday, 10 August 2004

East of England investment trust, Prelude has secured over a ten-fold return on its initial investment in Belgian company, FillFactory, following its sale to NYSE-listed Cypress Semiconductor. East of England investment trust, Prelude has secured over a ten-fold return on its initial investment in Belgian company, FillFactory, following its sale to NYSE-listed Cypress Semiconductor.

FillFactory specialises in image sensor technology for digital cameras.

It has strong sales into the automotive, medical imaging, machine vision, high-speed imaging and aerospace markets.

It also supplies the sensor for Kodak’s 14 million pixel digital professional camera.

Prelude’s share of the initial cash consideration is about £9.5m at current exchange rates. An additional cash consideration has been deferred.

Prelude’s share of the total $100m consideration supports its March valuation of its shareholding at £10.6 m, which represents more than ten times its investment and an IRR of 80 per cent per annum.

In 2003, FillFactory achieved revenues of EUR17.7m and profits of EUR2.4m.

Led by CEO Luc De Mey, it was founded by eleven leading scientists and engineers from IMEC, Belgium’s world-famous centre for next-generation silicon technologies.

“The market for image sensors is exploding and FillFactory’s products are among the highest-performance in the business,” said Tony Alvarez, executive vice president of Cypress’ memory products division, which will add FillFactory as a product line.

Like this story? Tag It:

Delicious