David Milne Quotations

We are also fortunate in being in quite a sheltered environment, in terms of people moving on to do other things, because there are relatively few companies in Scotland that are looking for the skill set that we've developed.

We see portability in electronics being a continuing requirement, higher functionality, better battery life, requiring lower power for the actual electronics.

But, when we started our product portfolio, we focused the mixed signal requirements first for image processing devices and then in audio applications , targeting our technology into the growing use of digital technology in consumer markets.

One of the attractive things about being in Scotland is that we have a very good pipeline of new people coming into the company from the excellent universities around us.

We have been a fabless semiconductor company for a number of years now.

We believe we've got the skill base and the techniques to supply the chips that really enable the end manufacturers to develop exciting, innovative products themselves.

Well, I think first of all, probably the most fundamental thing is that we are a mixed-signal analog semiconductor company, which, along with some of the other well-known names in the industry, enjoys very good economics.

We opened a design center in the South of England last year as part of our strategy for being close to our customers and developing innovative products for exciting new markets.

Clearly, Japan is a most important market for digital consumer products.

Watercolour could have been used more by the modernists. It is so direct, and when the white paper convention is accepted, so powerful, even brutal, that it would seem an ideal medium.

Anything is good painting material once you get to know it.

Science deals in evidence and uncertainty. Religion deals in certainty without evidence.

The painter doesn't try to reproduce the scene before him... he simplifies and eliminates until he knows exactly what stirred him, sets this down in color and line as simply and as powerfully as possible and so translates his impression into an aesthetic emotion.

There is a wide range of opportunities for us and we see a main part of our strategy as being a company that supplies products across a range of different end applications and indeed we have quite a wide product portfolio which we enhance each year.

Jim Reid and I started the company as a design company, as I said earlier, back in '85 and and we transformed it into a product company in 1995.

We have substantially improved our position in Japan which now represents a major part of our business.

Well, we are expanding in all of our segments of the market.

We are quite open, however, to looking at acquisitions and there are opportunities that we periodically consider. and I think that may be something we do in the future, but I must say that there is no commitment to that at the present time in any form or size.

Another dynamic of this last year was our increased penetration into the Japanese market.

In terms of development of the company, the vast majority of our sales are in the Far East and we will expect to strengthen our activities there, perhaps even moving some of our engineering activities abroad.

I don't really like to talk specifically about customers by name - but we work with nearly all the leading manufacturers of consumer products worldwide and at quite a detailed engineering level.

The growth of a company like ours tends to be a relatively steady because, like some of the other successful mixed signal companies, we have a wide range of products servicing a wide range of end applications.

All the action, in semiconductors at the present time is in the new consumer applications, and that's where we have focused our activities since we started doing our own products in the late '90s.