Teradyne and the shareholders of Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) have announced the acquisition of privately held MiR of Odense, Denmark for €121m ($148m) net of cash acquired plus €101m ($124m at current exchange rate) if certain performance targets are met extending through 2020.
MiR is a supplier of collaborative autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for industrial applications. The AMR market is an emerging category within the approximately $1.1bn 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 (AMRs). 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 $12m, more than triple 2016 revenues and had Q1’18 sales of $5m.
“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.”
