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Dialog sees profits fall despite power growth

Dialog sees profits fall despite power growth

Business news |
By Nick Flaherty



Full year revenue of $1.35bn was up 13% over 2016, although profits fell 40% to $187.0m from $309m the previous year. This follows the $300m acquisition of configurable power company Silego last year. However the volume of shipment increased significantly.

“In 2017, demand at the high end of the mobility segment improved, and across all our segments, we shipped 14% more chips than in 2016. In total, that amounts to almost 1.7 billion units of products shipped,” said Jalal Bagherli, CEO of Dialog. The year-on-year revenue growth was driven by the high volume ramp of new Power Management chips resulting in 55% growth in Mobile Systems and the consolidation of Silego.

“Good business momentum and a pipeline of key product launches give us confidence 2018 will be a year of good revenue growth,” he said. “In 2017, we expanded our design centres in Europe, Asia, and North America and there are now over 2,000 colleagues including in Silego in Dialog, 75% of whom work in engineering-related functions. Our talent pool is now based in 73 locations spread across 16 countries.”

“Focusing on mobility, we pioneered the programmable Power Management IC and our knowhow on integration and power efficiency allows us to deliver highly-integrated ICs in short-design cycles. We’ve also maintained a commanding market share in the smartphone rapid charge market of approximately 60%. Although adoption of RapidCharge technologies through second half of 2017 did not maintain the pace of previous years, we continue to make good progress introducing our first USBPD interface IC and pioneering the use of gallium nitride for mobility.”

Apple is a major customer for Dialog’s power management chips. “We are now past developing IP and evaluation of IP and we are well into completing or at least a good ways through completing design of the chip for the 2019 application,” he said.


“We intend to sample those chips in the second half of this year and this is again done on a collaborative ways, not done in isolation. But the commercial negotiation continues and is not finalized.”

The chart (above) reflects the average content per device from custom PMICs and includes all the platforms the company serves.

In Q4 2017 the company created the Advanced Mixed Signal segment grouping the former Power Conversion segment and Silego as well as the GaN device business and wireless charging.  However this division was the only one not to show a profit in 2017 despite double digit growth.

“Through the acquisition of Silego and the LED backlighting business from ams, we have expanded our Advanced Mixed Signal technologies contributing to the ongoing expansion of our customer base. And the strategic investment in Energous is gathering momentum following the FCC approval of the WattUp Mid Field transmitter. The investments helped us to address the significant opportunity in the wireless charging market and we have a full product road map ready to deliver,” he said.

“We remain positive about our prospects for 2018. We expect it to be another good year of revenue growth,” he added. “We expect RapidCharge technologies like USBPD to gather momentum in the second half of 2018. The AC-DC market continues to grow and the introduction of new technologies provides us with new opportunities. The same can be said for LED market where our broader LED backlighting portfolio will help us capitalize on our strong position.”

“Finally, on Silego, our primary focus is to maintain business momentum with existing customers and introduce the benefits of the CMIC technology to Asian customers. We expect revenue from Silego to grow 15% year-on-year in 2018.”

Dialog also saw growth in automotive and connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT), where the complexity of power management in connected devices like wearables and smartwatches is gradually gathering pace, as devices become more complex and need better power management.  “With Bluetooth low energy, we have built an entire product range of innovative SoCs, which gives our customers a substantial energy savings and a smaller form factor. As a result in 2017, we’ve maintained 16% market share in BLE according to IHS October market data and our own estimates,” he said.

www.dialog-semi.com

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