EBITDA in 2015 is defined as net income excluding income tax expense (2015:$77.6 million, 2014: $31.2 million), depreciation for property, plant and equipment, (2015:$24.0 million, 2014:$22.1 million), amortisation of intangible assets (2015:$31.1 million, 2014:$33.4 million), losses on disposals and impairment of fixed assets (2015:$1.8 million, 2014:$0.4 million) and excluding interest and foreign exchange movements (2015:net loss $4.9million, 2014: net loss $16.6 million).
(***) Free Cash Flow in FY 2015 is defined as net income of $177.3 million plus amortisation and depreciation of $55.1 million, plus net interest expense of $5.2 million, plus change in working capital of $26.4 million and minus capital expenditure of $71.7 million.
Operational overview
The hard work of all Dialogs' employees was recognised with two awards from the Global Semiconductor Alliance. Dialog Semiconductor won the 2015 awards for the "Most Respected Public Semiconductor Company Achieving $1 Billion to $2 Billion in Annual Sales" and the "Best Financially Managed Semiconductor Company Achieving Greater than $500 Million in Annual Sales".
In 2015, we hired close to 300 engineers to take the global employee base to approximately 1,660 across 14 countries. We expanded our design centres in Europe, Taiwan and China and opened a new design centre in Phoenix, Arizona.
Deep R&D investment enabled the company to strengthen our competitive positioning and deliver the highest level of power management integration and power efficiency in our PMIC products. Our focus on innovation underpins the potential for content increase over the medium term. In 2015, the Average Sales Price (ASP) of our main products, on a like-for-like basis increased by 8%, from $2.90 in 2014 to $3.13 in 2015. In Q4 2015, we also added new custom PMIC design wins both across new platforms and next generation models at our largest customers.
In support of our diversification strategy, leveraging our power management expertise, during 2015 and in early 2016 we expanded into several adjacent consumer mobile markets:
- Power Management ICs for IoT and high end wearable devices;
- PMICs for Mobile Computing systems;
- Highly integrated PMICs for smart TV and set-top box (STB) market. This new family of products will deliver compelling benefits to the TV analog power path. Dialog is the first company to deliver PMICs for this application.
The sub-PMIC MediaTek platform product performed well during 2015, wining multiple China based customers in smartphone and tablet products.
In 2015 the Connectivity segment shipped seven times more Bluetooth Smart units than in 2014, a strong indication of our increasing market share and the rapid adoption of the technology across a wide range of IoT applications. The segment made solid progress in capturing the high-growth opportunity within IoT with our ultra-low power Bluetooth(R) Smart technology:
- Expanding the first family of SmartBond(TM) products with three new application-optimised versions for wireless charging, remote control units with voice, motion and gesture recognition and those which require flash embedded memory. This progression was also accompanied by a series of design wins including for our SmartBond DA14582 Bluetooth SoC which is now at the heart of Xiaomi's new Mi Bluetooth(R) Voice Remote Control;
- Launched the world's first Bluetooth(R) Smart Wearable-on-Chip, the first single chip solution for wearables;
- Focused our effort into the Smart Home market the launch of Dialog's Bluetooth(R) Smart development kit with full support for Apple(R) HomeKit;
- Collaborated with Bosch Sensortec to create an extremely low power smart sensor platform that combines Bosch Sensortec's sensors with Dialog's Bluetooth(R) Smart technology.
Power Conversion made also significant progress in capturing the high growth opportunity in the quick charge segment with large OEMs in Asia. In Q4 2015 we announced that one of our advanced power management chipsets is at the heart of Samsung's latest Adaptive Fast Charging (AFC) AC/DC wall adapter. The custom chipset incorporates Samsung's proprietary AFC technology. Together with the design wins with Huawei, LeTV and other Japanese phone makers, it builds upon Dialog's estimated 70% market share of the rapid charging adapter market for smartphones, tablet and other mobile devices.
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Dialog Semiconductor invites you today at 09.30 am (London) / 10.30 am (Frankfurt) to take part in a live conference call and to listen to management's discussion of the Company's Q4 and full year 2015 performance, as well as guidance for Q1 2016. Participants will need to register using the link below labelled 'Online Registration'. A full list of dial-in numbers will also be available.
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