Intel has agreed to acquire Mobileye for a little over $15B (about $63.54 per share). Via CNBC:
U.S. chip giant Intel has agreed to buy Israeli driverless technology firm Mobileye for $15.3 billion, the largest ever acquisition of an Israeli high-tech company.
The $63.54 per share cash deal is the world’s biggest purchase of a company solely focused on the autonomous driving sector. Mobileye accounts for 70 percent of the global market for advanced driver-assistance and anti-collision systems.
Intel said it expected the transaction to close within the next nine months and to immediately boost its non-GAAP earnings per share, as well as its free cash flow.
Ugh that’s another holding taken out. On the plus side I’m making great progress reducing my number of holdings - unfortunately it’s not coming out of the tail end.
Ant - I thought of you when I read the first post. I lol when I saw you had already responded that you had it. I don’t think there has been a tech buyout you haven’t owned since I’ve been on the board.
I think I’m running out of the “in-play” tech targets.
There maybe some consolidation in healthcare with the Trump healthcare reforms underway as well as in O&G with any sustained oil price recovery. Once Trump sorts out the overseas profits repatriation and reduces corp tax rates - I can envisage a pretty substantial wave of mergers and acquisitions. Possibly cyber security and data storage are sectoral candidates.
Here is an introductory article on the topic of Ambarella in the autonomous auto space.
If Elon Musk is correct, autonomous driving will be cameras and radar, not LIDAR. If correct, AMBA has as much opportunity here as anyone else if they focus on it. They will need to actually get some product going though.
I don’t like to bet against Musk. Especially since I have seen his near prescience looking into the future.
OTOH his objections to Lidar may fade if Lidar gets cheap enough.
Humans are limited by nature to visible light spectrum (plus a bit of sound back up) Machines are not this limited , they can combine multiple parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus eventually the machines will understand , “see” the world around the car much better than humans ever will be able to do. This is inevitable , it’s only matter of time and cost. Lidar and cameras both use EM frequencies close to each other and thus have not too dissimilar imitations, radar is further away.
I wonder if soundproof vibration sensors will be added. They should be cheap and would help keep you from running off the road thanks to "rumble " strips on the pavement
Most of these sensors are sold in small numbers. Cameras on mobile phones have shown the wonders of true mass production in bringing the price down from hundreds of dollars to a dollar or so.
EV and especially autonomous driving are about as “sure thing” tech bets as you can get. Because the benefits are obvious to almost anybody and the base tech breakthroughs are mostly in place now. It is a matter of refinement, improvement, and cost reduction. But this latter point is no great help in finding specific companies at affordable stock prices. The likely candidates have already been bid up…
Most autonomous driving will be generic , furnished by companies like Bosch. Auto companies lack the money and talent to develop it themselves. Tesla may be the exception, considering it a differentiating feature . Aside from Tesla (probably a big winner or a bust) it remains to be seen which auto companies will be able to leverage EV into increased sales.
AI will be big, maybe 15% to 20% of computing - a niche but in a large TAM.
