Zebra Technology Announces Acquisition of Zebra Technology for USD 290 Million in Cash

On July 1, 2021, Zebra Technologies, a giant in the field of automatic signage in the United States, announced the acquisition of the remaining 95% of the shares of Fetch Robotics, a fully autonomous mobile robot developer, for US$290 million in cash. The transaction is expected to be the third in 2021. Finished quarterly. Before this acquisition, Zebra Technology acquired 5% of Fetch Robotics through investment.

Fetch Robotics was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in San Jose, California, dedicated to the development of intelligent warehouse robots. In the second year of the company's establishment, Fetch Robotics launched two "suitable" robots: "Fetch" and "Freight". "Fetch" focuses on removing items from the shelves, and "Freight" is dedicated to the transportation of goods. The suit robot of Fetch Robotics "emphasizes the combination of the advantages of dexterous fetching and fast delivery in logistics" quickly broke the industry's inherent impression of warehouse robots.

Subsequently, Fetch Robotics continued to improve its product line, simultaneously launching heavy-duty autonomous mobile robots: Freight 500 can withstand a payload of 500 kg, and Freight 1500 can withstand a payload of 1500 kg. In addition to robot hardware, Fetch Robotics believes that for robots to realize self-navigation and autonomous driving, it is necessary to gather all the material data collection of warehousing and other internal logistics environments in the cloud for processing and analysis, to help robots quickly adapt to complex and changeable working environments. And realize the interaction within the robot army. Therefore, in 2016, Fetch Robotics began to study cloud intelligent storage robots.

In addition to the independent research and development of software and hardware products, it can be seen from the financing table at the beginning of the article that Fetch Robotics has paid great attention to building a circle of friends with its own resources from the early stage of its development, such as introducing industrial resources such as SoftBank and Zebra Ventures in financing. Zebra (Nasdaq: ZBRA) was founded in 1969, and it didn't make a splash in the market until it started producing bar code printers and scanners in the early 1980s. At the beginning of the 21st century, they entered the field of radio frequency identification and acquired Motorola's mobile computing business in 2014.

Zebra has more than 10,000 partners in more than 100 countries/regions. Its main customers are from the retail, warehousing, logistics, or healthcare sectors. Its market-leading solutions enhance the shopping experience, track and manage inventory, and improve supply chain efficiency. In 2020, Zebra was included in the Forbes Global 2000 list for the second consecutive year, with a market value of US$25 billion.

Zebra Technologies, the parent company of Zebra Ventures, further helped Fetch Robotics polish its products after taking a stake. In March 2020, Fetch Robotics and Zebra Technologies announced in-depth cooperation to automate the picking process by integrating Fetch's autonomous mobile robots and Zebra's FulfillmentEdge software. The two companies jointly released the first fully autonomous mobile robot that fully complies with R15.08 in December 2020.

Anders Gustafsson, CEO of Zebra Technologies, said: "The acquisition of Fetch Robotics will give a new model of workflow, helping customers operate more efficiently in an increasingly automated, data-driven environment, and thereby accelerate the growth of our corporate asset intelligence vision and intelligent industrial automation." This move will also expand the company's supply chain from production to consumption and continuously optimize.

The Fetch team said: “It’s great to join Zebra and accelerate the adoption of flexible automation through AMR and our cloud-based robotics platform. Together, we have the right team, the right technology, and provide end-to-end solutions to real customer problems. . By helping customers dynamically optimize and coordinate their e-commerce contract fulfillment, distribution, and manufacturing operations, we help customers stay ahead of growing demand, minimize delivery time and solve the problem of shrinking labor resources."

At present, there are more and more AMR suppliers on the market that focus on the logistics industry. Fetch Robotics’s main competitors also include Locus Robotics, which recently raised US$150 million in Series E financing, and in September 2019, it was sold to Shopify for US$450 million. Acquired 6 River Systems; domestic warehousing and logistics robot manufacturers include Hairou Innovation, Jiangge Robot, Sophony Jump, and Huicang Intelligence.