Apple will employ 300 computer chip engineers following a deal with Dialog Semiconductor.
The company is paying one of its suppliers, Dialog Semiconductor, $300 million (£227 million) for the engineers. In addition to the acquisition of new engineers, Apple will also gain some of Dialog’s patents and facilities in Reading.
The staff involved in the acquisition are based in Swindon, Livorno (Italy), Nabern (Germany) and Neuaubing (Germany).
The company’s hardware technologies chief, Johny Srouji, said:
“Dialog has deep expertise in chip development and we are thrilled to have this talented group of engineers who have long supported our products now working directly for Apple.”
Apple has also announced that it has pre-paid Dialog in order to secure supplies.
Indeed, the company paid an additional $300 million to its supplier in order to secure products for the next three years.
Senior editor at the engineering news site AnandTech commented:
“In the industry this kind of move is known as being more vertically integrated,”
“It’s something that’s already true of Samsung and its smartphones – for example it also makes its own displays.”
“The benefits for Apple having full control at the component level should be lower overheads and therefore reduced costs.”
“But a downside could be there’s less fallback if something goes wrong.”
The deal with Dialog is set to be completed within the first six months of next year.
Moreover, Chief Executive of Dialog, Jalal Bagherli, said that he hoped that the deal would allow Dialog to become less dependent on Apple.
“For us to change in any other way would be more painful,”
“They wanted to create their own solutions in-house. And we could accelerate that, but in the process monetise some of our intellectual property assets and also find a home for many of our employees in a good company – I think it’s a win-win situation.”
At 11:21 GMT-4 today, shares in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) were trading at -0.38%.
At 17:07 CEST today, shares in Dialog Semiconductor PLC (ETR:DLG) were trading at +25.67%.
