Imagination Technologies gets bought out by Chinese investor for $745 million

Imagination Technologies has had a rocky year as the company's confession that Apple would dump its PowerVR intellectual property resulted in a huge hit to its future business prospects. Apple was Imagination's biggest customer so the loss of this contract was devastating.

This summer the company said it was exploring a sale and now news rolls in that Imagination Technologies has been sold to a Chinese-backed investment firm. The bid represents a 41.6 percent premium versus Imagination's share price on Friday.

Canyon Bridge is taking over most of Imagination Technologies' assets for 550 million pounds, about $744 million. The investment group is also looking to buy US chipmaker Lattice Semiconductor for $1.3 billion but that buyout got shot down by the Trump administration as the US government has national security concerns.

One part of Imagination that will not be sold to Canyon Bridge is the MIPS division. It's not known why this unit is sold separately but Imagination said Tallwood Venture Capital offered $65 million for MIPS.

At the moment, it's not clear whether Tallwood simply offered a better price or whether the deal was explicitly structured this way to ease regulatory approval. Either way, it's no secret that China wants to get its hands on more MIPS assets, so a lot of questions will be raised about this.