I think of times we were together,
As time went on it seemed forever,
Times have changed now things are better,
Someone had to pay the price.

(from Here Today, Gone Tomorrow by the Ramones, 1977)

Having a big client is nice for a company as it can take some financial pressure away. But if this big client decides to stop buying your products, the bright future suddenly turns to dusk. Sad for the company, of course, but things like this happen all the time in the harsh world of business. Usually we don’t hear about it, but when the client is Apple and the product in question is related to the graphics capabilities of i-devices, it becomes big news.

The company losing the client in this case is Imagination Technology. They licence intellectual property (IP) for graphical applications to Apple, who has quietly been developing a proprietary solution to gain more control over their own products.

Imagination shares, worth about one billion dollars before the news came out, dropped by more than 70%.
 
Imagination is also the company that licences the MIPS core, a competitor for ARM products, used by Microchip, among others, in their PIC32 product line.