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ARC moving on an upwards curve

Written by Sam Fountain

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

ARC's president and CEO, Carl Schlachte Prolific purchasing has boosted the confidence of chip designer, ARC International for the coming year, despite widening the company's pre-tax losses for the 2007. The St Albans and San Jose-based computer systems maker posted a pre-tax loss of £3.89m for the year to December 2007, compared with a loss of about £2.72m last time. It added that without the inclusion of the year's acquisitions, which it said fills out ARC's technology, net losses for the period had decreased by ten per cent to £1m. Of the numerous acquisitions this period, the company said that "Alarity, Teja, and Tenison establish ARC's ability to deliver vertically integrated multimedia solutions to high value semiconductor companies," while Sonic Focus, bought this month, "adds a new, complementary class of customer and revenue channel through licensing its audio enhancement software directly to OEMs." Of its results for the year to December, ARC said that revenues were up seven per cent to £14.4m, driven mainly by a 44 per cent increase in royalty revenues, up to £4.9m despite the unfavourable currency translation.   "2007 was a year of important achievements and solid growth for ARC International," said CEO, Carl Schlachte. "ARC's revenue growth again outpaced the semiconductor market. Royalties increased to a record high and contracts completed since 2004 began to contribute royalty revenue during the year." In a statement accompanying the year's results, Schlachte also referred to two huge deals for the company, signed during the year, with two global giants; a ten year licensing agreement with Broadcom and a multi-year, royalty bearing licensing agreement with Intel. "Two of the largest customer agreements in the company's history were announced, including Intel, and ARC enters 2008 with record highs in backlog and the sales pipeline," he continued. In a separate statement, ARC also announced that the company had extended its long term relationship with Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME), with the Japanese company taking licence of an ARC audio solution to process multi-standard audio codecs in FME's next generation high definition (HD) digital television decoders. Shares in the micro-capped firm have risen almost one per cent, or 0.25p to 27.25p. Set as favorite Bookmark Email This Hits: 571 Trackback(0) TrackBack URI for this entry Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Write comment This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment.

 

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