Flexible chip innovator Pragmatic Semiconductor has seen operating losses widen amid large scale investment, including in its North East factory.
As production at the firm's new high-volume, County Durham production site was ramped up, new accounts show its operating losses grew to £55.1m in 2024, compared with operating losses of £36.7m the year before. That came as revenue fell slightly to £1.69m from £1.7m.
Bosses said the numbers reflected a substantial increase in investment across the business. Pragmatic has successfully raised more than £180m including from backers such as the º£½ÇÊÓƵ Infrastructure Bank and M&G Catalyst, and a further fundraise is planned for 2026.
The pioneering firm has made waves in the industry with its ultra-thin, flexible chips which provide a sustainable alternative to traditional silicon counterparts and can provide connectivity and computing capabilities for a range of uses including in consumer packaging and wearable healthcare tech. Its 15 acre Pragmatic Park manufacturing site at Meadowfield was opened last year by Princess Anne and has the capacity to host up to nine fabrication lines that can produce billions of chips each year.
The landmark site is the º£½ÇÊÓƵ's first ever 300mm wafer fab and the 300-strong company's second production line. A third overall production line is under construction.
Pragmatic said demand for its "breakthrough" technology is being spurred by the growing use of artificial intelligence and the digitisation of physical products. It says its chips can be embedded in "virtually any object on the planet" to provide intelligence. Bosses also said demand for greater supply chain resilience in the face of geopolitical tensions, and significant reductions in emissions, provided helpful strong tailwinds.
Writing in the accounts, CEO David Moore said: "The company sees a forward-looking addressable market opportunity in excess of $50bn, and the company's FlexIC Foundry service allows customers to easily develop their own flexible chips to address an increasingly wide range of applications. In 2024, the company continued to take bespoke chip designs for multiple foundry customers, generating revenues of £1,693,000 (2023: £1,705,000), through to successful manufacturing, leveraging our extremely low production cycle time of days (vs months for silicon) to enable agile optimisation cycles for electronics hardware development and manufacturing.
"A significant near-term target market opportunity for the company's technology is in near-field communication applications. In 2024 we continued to develop and expand our engagement with smart label and inlay manufacturers (with present engagements now representing approx. 90% of the global market) and increased demand with selected downstream customers, including leading global packaging companies and major consumer brand owners, in use cases with clear requirements for billions of items every year."
About £23.7m was spent on research and development during the year, with Pragmatic saying it made significant progress in developing the FlexIC technology. The company has been speaking to smart label and inlay customers, which it said included top global packaging companies and major consumer brand owners with clear uses for billions of chips.
