Loughborough targets U.S. DSP board market

Electronic News, August 18, 1997 by Gale B. Morrison

New York--Digital signal processor (DSP) board and subsystem supplier Loughborough Sound Images has set its sights on the U.S. in a big way. As part of this planned strategic thrust in the U.S. market, Loughborough continues its close ties to DSP leader Texas Instruments.

The target is logical because the U.S. is where 50 percent of all DSPs sell, and Loughborough--so named for the town two hours north of London where it was founded in 1983--aims to get at the market first hand, according to company president Kevin Parslow.

The preparation for this has been a $9.5 million investment from BankBoston back in April, a non-exclusive North America distribution agreement inked in 1997 with 10-year representative Spectrum Signal Processing of Canada, and the opening of a Lexington, Mass., office with plans for three or four more.

Now Mr. Parnslow and the rest of company management believe Loughborough is poised to reach its two goals by the year 2000: an initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq and $250 million a year in revenue (ten times that of fiscal 1996).

Loughborough is closely aligned with Texas Instruments, the dominant force in DSPs now. Mr. Parnslow first names TI and then Analog Devices as its DSP chip vendors, though the company receives chips from a variety of partners. Who he names six months from now could be different, as Lucent Technologies and Motorola turn up the heat this fall with answers to TI's well-received C6x line (EN, Feb. 3).

Mr. Parnslow agreed that all the DSP trumpeting TI has done in the recent past means good things for his company's corporate marketing; being aligned with the world leader is not a bad thing, he said.

And it is in Loughborough's best interest to continue to highlight its Texas Instrument C4x offerings because, Mr. Parnslow said, the company's customers greatly desire continuity from the start of their business relationship. Certain OEMs want Loughborough to have ready more of the same 3,000 or so DSP boards they ordered even seven or eight years ago, he said.

But what has changed for Loughborough is the question of what money can be made from certain Loughborough-generated development tools and applications support. "We're selling that now," Mr. Parnslow told EN in New York last week. "A number of years ago we gave that stuff away. We charge them for it now."

Forward Concepts, the DSP market research firm in Phoenix, Ariz., said that Loughborough holds about a 20 percent share of the world DSP board and subsystem markets. Mr. Parnslow said that share is well-distributed across the types of customers they have, from military/aerospace to medical, though the communications sector is the largest piece of the pie, as one would expect with DSPs.