News English — Automation

DECLINING VALUATIONS? REALLY? We recently heard Clearpath Robotics/Otto Motors was acquired by Rockwell (source) and thought that perhaps valuations had been affected by the massive decline in valuation of 6 River Systems. 6 River Systems (link) was founded in 2015 by ex-Kiva Systems (acquired by Amazon in 2012) people and was acquired by Shopify in 2019 for $450m (source). In 2023, Shopify's change of strategy led them to divest 6 River Systems for $12.7m (source), representing a 35X value destruction. STIQ's inital thought was that this may affect valuations in the wider automation sector, but it appears the Shopify divestment was viewed as...

Following a visit to LogiMAT 2023 in Stuttgart, Germany it became clear that the Cube Storage sector, pioneered by AutoStore in the 1990's, has become increasingly attractive to many different companies. There appeared to be an influx of startups and legacy companies targeting the Cube Storage sector and some of the people we talked to confirmed this impression from the April trade show. Most of these vendors are European, mainly from Germany and Netherlands. Note also that these companies targeted the Cube Storage space from a variety of angles, i.e. for storage or for transportation, etc. Volume Lagertechnik had developed a robot with...

This blog post outlines STIQs view of the new product releases in Ocado's January 2022 Re:imagined event and includes comments from STIQs presentation with Credit Suisse (equity research team) on January 31st, 2022. Agree? Yes/No? We invite your comments on this blog post!   On Wednesday January 26th, 2022, Ocado Group updated the world on some of its more recent developments. These broadly fell into hardware and software developments: Hardware 600 Series Bot On Grid Robotic Pick Automated Frame Load Software Swift Router Orbit Flex 600 Series Bot The new upgraded bot featured a 3D printed chassis, what STIQ believe to be wireless charging plate...