Teradyne Acquires Mobile Industrial Robots
This deal expands Teradyne’s footprint in the rapidly growing market segment of collaborative robots.
Posted: May 1, 2018
Teradyne, Inc. (North Reading, MA) and the shareholders of Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR; Odense, Denmark) have acquired privately-held MiR for $148 million net of cash acquired, plus $124 million at the current exchange rate, if certain performance targets are met extending through 2020. MiR is a leading supplier of collaborative autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for industrial applications, an emerging category within the approximately $1.1 billion logistics systems segment of the professional services robot market that is expected to grow rapidly in the years ahead. The company was profitable in 2017 with annual revenue of $12 million (more than triple 2016 revenues) and had 2018 first quarter sales of $5 million.
“We are excited to have MiR join our widening portfolio of advanced, intelligent, automation products,” stated Mark Jagiela, the president and chief executive officer of Teradyne. “They are the market leader in the nascent, but fast-growing market for collaborative AMRs. Like Universal Robots‘ (UR; Odense, Denmark) collaborative robots, their collaborative AMRs lower the barrier for both large and small enterprises to incrementally automate their operations without the need for specialty staff or a re-layout of their existing workflow. This, combined with a fast return on investment, opens a vast new automation market. Following the path proven with UR, we expect to leverage our company’s global capabilities to expand MiR’s reach.”
“Joining Teradyne allows us to advance our engineering and development investments to provide greater value to our customers and further expand our market leadership in industrial AMRs,” stated Thomas Visti, the chief executive officer of MiR. “Their worldwide reach, world-class engineering and support capabilities, financial strength and proven model for leveraging those strengths will help us grow in new and existing markets worldwide.”
“My main focus is to get our mobile robots out to the entire world,” stated Niels Jul Jacobsen, the chief strategy officer and founder of MiR. “With Teradyne as our owner, we will have strong backing to ensure our continued growth in the global market.”
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