Shares in British chipmaker nosedive after customer delays hit earnings

EnSilica forecasts reporting turnover of £19m-£20m for the year ending May

By HARRY WISE

Updated: 14:17 BST, 7 April 2025

EnSilica shares slumped on Monday after the chipmaker warned that customer delays on two projects would impact results this year.

The group now anticipates a contract with Italian telecoms corporation Siae Microelettronica, which is set to deliver ‘significant’ returns, will be delivered over the 2026 and 2027 financial years, rather than 2025.

EnSilica also expects the ‘high-value tape-out’ of an Edge AI chip to begin in the first half of FY2026, hitting 2025 revenues and earnings by about £4million and £3million, respectively.

Consequently, EnSilica forecasts reporting turnover of £19million to £20million and earnings of between £0.1million and £0.5million for the year ending May.

For the following 12 months, the business is guiding for £33million to £35million, with around 80 per cent of this covered by existing customer contracts.

Shares in the Oxfordshire-based group plummeted by 24.4 per cent to 29.5p by the early afternoon, making them one of the AIM All-Share Index’s ten biggest fallers.

Outlook: EnSilica shares slumped on Monday after the chipmaker warned that customer delays on two projects would impact results this year

Ian Lankshear, chief executive of EnSilica, said the delays were ‘disappointing’, but told investors they would not damage the firm’s medium-term performance.

He added: ‘We have revised our future guidance to reflect a more conservative outlook of the timing of our growth trajectory, and I would emphasise that we remain fully confident that EnSilica is still strongly positioned to deliver significant returns to our shareholders.’

EnSilica, which specialises in making mixed-signal application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), gained six new design and supply deals in the first 10 months of this fiscal year.

It expects the contracts to generate non-recurring engineering [NRE] revenues of over $40million across the next two financial years.

NRE revenues refer to the fees charged to clients for designing chips, including high-value costs like tape-out fees and other major third-party costs.

Thanks to its bumper order book and rising profits from supplying chips, EnSilica is confident of having ‘sufficient capital’ to reach positive cash generation by the end of FY2026.

Up until then, the group believes its turnover will grow month-on-month, supported by customer activities expanding in line with recent contract wins.

EnSilica was co-founded in 2001 by Lankshear, who previously worked for Hitachi and Nokia, to offer consultancy services to the semiconductor sector.

Its ASICs chips are used by firms across a broad range of industries, such as airlines, automotive, healthcare, and communications.

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Shares in British chipmaker nosedive after customer delays hit earnings

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Shares in British chipmaker nosedive after customer delays hit earnings