GloNav sold to Philips firm for €76.5m

GloNav, a US technology company with an Irish R&D base and backed by local private equity house Atlantic Bridge Ventures, has been sold to NXP Semiconductors for $110 million (€76.5 million). John Collinsreports.

The US registered semiconductor company was only founded by Atlantic Bridge last year when it was spun out of Ceva.

An initial cash payment of $85 million will be paid to GloNav's investors with a further $25 million payable if the company achieves certain targets.

Atlantic Bridge and Ceva have quadrupled their investment in GloNav, according to a Ceva statement. Ceva holds approximately 20 per cent of GloNav, while Atlantic Bridge is understood to have a 50 per cent stake. GloNav launched with a $16.2 million investment from Atlantic Bridge.

Brian Long, managing partner of Atlantic Bridge said the sale was a "great result" for the technology investors. GloNav had performed "extraordinarily well" and there had been two other bidders interested in the company.

GloNav is a fabless semiconductor company, which designs silicon chips and sub-contracts manufacturing.

Its main product is a global positioning system (GPS) chispet that is embedded in mobile phones. A unique feature of the system is that it is able to operate indoors.

Mr Long said GloNav had primarily sold the single chip GPS system to Chinese mobile phone manufacturers including Mobile XP and Sunrise and it was already shipping in products.

Last year Atlantic Bridge acquired RFDomus, a Californian specialist in radio technology and merged it with GloNav in order to give the necessary radio capability for a one-chip solution.

Ceva is the Israeli-founded firm with which Irish chip designer Parthus merged in 2002. A number of Atlantic Bridge partners, including Mr Long, Elaine Coughlan, Gerry Maguire and Peter McManamon, were formerly senior managers at Parthus. Mr McManamon is still chairman of Ceva.

NXP Semiconductors was founded by Dutch electronics group Philips. It has 37,000 staff and posted revenues of €5 billion in 2006.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008.

Mr Long said 2007 has been a "phenomenal year" for Atlantic Bridge and it had been involved in seven major transactions.