Vision Group Plc, the Edinburgh-based electronic vision company whose VLSI Vision Ltd subsidiary markets single-chip cameras, is coming to the Official List of the London Stock Exchange with a placing of 5.2m shares, all new, at 97 pence per share. This values the company at ú30.0m. Vision will use ú950,000 of the ú4.5m net proceeds to repay a loan from Donnelly Corp of Holland, Michigan, which has maintained its 32% in the enlarged equity. A further ú120,000 will go to buy out a royalty stream from Edinburgh University and the remainder will be used for working capital. The company, which was started from an office on the campus of Edinburgh University with a ú60,000 grant back in 1990, has four main products. First came the Peach camera, a miniature monochrome video camera used in security applications, entry phones and closed circuit television. Although successful, it was constrained by only being PAL Phase Alternation Line-compatible, making it suitable only for European and Chinese markets. The Cedar camera, which is also NTSC National Television System Committee-compatible – thus opening up the US market – is due to be launched shortly. Vision has two ‘smart’ cameras in the Imputer and PC Card Camera. The latter is a miniature monochrome camera launched last year (CI No 2,496) that plugs in to portable computers and enables still and video pictures to be captured in various formats.
Machine vision market
It is designed for use in the field and also has videoconferencing applications. The Imputer is a programmable camera developed for the machine vision market in the areas of production line inspection, traffic monitoring and surveillance. Thus far, the company estimates sales of the Peach to be around ú700,000 and the Imputer ú500,000. Vision sub-contracts all its manufacturing to plants in Taiwan and France. The advantage these products have over their competitors, says the company, is that of low cost, low power consumption and their size. However, due to various confidentiality agreements, Vision was unable to name all but a few of its customers. Vision is also engaged in supplying customised OEM products. A US retail company has recently placed an order with Vision for a customised Imputer to count customers, and an office equipment manufacturer will use a Vision camera to verify data codes. Donnelly Corp is at the prototype stage with Vision on the development of a camera embedded in a rear-view mirror that reacts to approaching headlights by dimming the mirror, thus reducing the glare (CI No 2,187). Denyer believes that the company’s low-cost approach is ideally suited to the children’s toy market. Again, no names were forthcoming, but Vision is incorporating a camera into a US manufacturer’s toy for this year’s Christmas market. Co-founder and managing director Peter Denyer said that multimedia is perhaps the biggest potential market for Vision’s technology, in particular videoconferencing. It is also the most immediate market, along with entry phones. The automotive industry was described as the day after tomorrow’s market by marketing director Roy Warrender. Denyer would not make any profit forecasts, other than to say that it would move into the black once turnover reached around ú700,000. It is believed that this will come about quite soon, perhaps by the end of next year. In the six months to January 31 pre-tax losses were ú638,000 from turnover of ú813,000. Around half of the company’s research and development is funded by its customers, and it estimates that it will amount to around ú1m in total this fiscal. Denyer said that a conservative estimate of the total electronic vision market would be ú600m by 1999. At present, all Vision’s cameras are monochrome, but with the advent of colour later this year, the company will be able to cut into the market currently dominated by the large Japanese video camera makers that use Charge-Coupled Device technology. Vision’s CMOS technology should make cameras smaller and cheaper, according to Denyer. He said that Vision has had invitations
to talk with some of these companies, but has so far declined. Competition appears to be thin on the ground – particularly at the ‘smart’ end of the business – and most of it still in the research stage. Denyer believes that Vision is at least two years ahead of the latest developments. In December 1994, it raised ú2.4m net proceeds from a private placing at an equivalent of roughly 40 pence per share. The new shares represent 16.7% of the enlarged share capital. Trading in the shares will commence on April 12. The potential applications for the technology could be vast, including realistically-priced videophones, medical applications such as disposable cameras for endoscopes, traffic flow analysis and fingerprint recognition. Marketing director Warrender spun the analogy of huge mountains ahead, but already being in the foothills, rather than stuck back on the plains.
