US industrial giant Teradyne has become a powerful force in the collaborative robotics sector with the purchase of Mobile Industrial Robots, the maker of warehouse robots.
The new acquisition adds to Teradyne’s existing purchase of Universal Robots, which is the leading supplier of collaborative industrial robotic arms. Teradyne, which specialises in supplying automatic test equipment, generated approxmately $2.2 billion revenue in 2017.
Teradyne announced the acquisition of privately held MiR of Odense, Denmark for €121 million ($148 million) net of cash acquired plus €101 million ($124 million at current exchange rate) if certain performance targets are met extending through 2020.
MiR is a leading supplier of collaborative autonomous mobile robots for industrial applications.
The autonomous mobile robots market is an emerging category within the approximately $1.1 billion logistics systems segment of the professional services robot market and is expected to grow rapidly in the years ahead.
“We are excited to have MiR join Teradyne’s widening portfolio of advanced, intelligent, automation products,” said Mark Jagiela, President and CEO of Teradyne. “MiR is the market leader in the nascent, but fast growing market for collaborative autonomous mobile robots.
“Like Universal Robots’ collaborative robots, MiR 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 Universal Robots, we expect to leverage Teradyne’s global capabilities to expand MiR’s reach.”
MiR was profitable in 2017 with annual revenue of $12 million, more than triple 2016 revenues and had Q1’18 sales of $5 million.
“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 autonomous mobile robots,” said Thomas Visti, CEO of MiR.
“Teradyne’s 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,” said Niels Jul Jacobsen, CSO, founder of MiR. “With Teradyne as the owner, we will have strong backing to ensure MiR’s continued growth in the global market.”
