It appears that the board was not that happy with Sir Hossein Yassaie (pictured), who had run the company since 1998.

He would appear to be a casualty of Apple’s failing business and the fact that the company had become increasingly dependent on Jobs’ Mob the keep to the problem has been its loss-making digital audio business, Pure. Pure is now going to be sold off and the company is going to invest more in its PowerVR graphics core designs.
Board member Andrew Heath will serve as interim CEO.

Imagination reported a $19 million loss in its last fiscal year, which ended April 30, 2015, compared to a small profit the previous year.

The company forecast a better second half would pull it out of the red for the full year. That recovery never came, presumably because Apple cut back on its orders when Imagination needed them.

Officially Imagination said that the fall was due to “not signing as many new licensing deals for its chip cores as it had expected” and the another was with existing licenses, where royalties from some key customers fell short of its previous expectations for the fourth quarter of 2015.

Imagination does have other customers and it owns the rights to the compact, low-power MIPS processor design used as an alternative to ARM chips in cars, routers and Android smartphones.

Imagination plans to cut around £15 million from operating expenses in its next fiscal year, but plans to reinvest around £2 million of that in its PowerVR designs..