A few years ago I was working for a company which provided value added mobile services to the UK market. The biggest money maker at the time was premium SMS, however we didn't have our own SMS gateway - we just resold services of another provider (which was unbeknown to clients at the time).

Shortly after I joined the bosses decided that we were giving away too much money to the provider, so began talks for an acquisition. The provider was willing, but were asking for much more than we were offering, so the talks fell apart. As such we ended up building our own SMS gateway and switched all our traffic to that - exactly replicating their API, bugs and all, in less than a year.

As we were their main customer they ended up losing 70%+ of their revenue overnight when we switched. A couple of years later we bought them, for much less than we originally offered. Both companies at the time were private companies, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same happens here.

Almost certainly not.

Apple just announced to the whole world that they are no longer interested in Imagnation Technologies' IP.

Announcing to the world that they were interested in Imagination Technologies after all (by acquiring them) would not only have made the prior announcement deceptive, but also (almost certainly) be considered market manipulation, given that the announcement caused a 60% drop in the stock's price.

I wouldn't put this past them as an acquisition tactic, Imagination drops MIPS, Ensigma and suddenly they look very attractive just for the patents alone.

I think apple already has shares in IMG. This would be huge blow to them since they are their 1 big customer.

It makes them a more attractive acquisition target for anyone who wants a decent IP portfolio.

Wouldn't that be considered manipulation? Or at least, using inside information.