Vodafone Group yesterday said it had agreed to buy an Italian provider of electronics services to the car industry for 145 million euros (US$197 million) as part of its strategy to connect millions of devices such as cars and other machines.
The British telecommunications company said it had agreed to buy Cobra Automotive Technologies, a provider of security, telecommunications and vehicle tracking for the automotive and insurance industries.
Vodafone, like other mobile operators, is looking to expand into the so-called machine-to-machine (M2M) industry to connect devices within sectors, including healthcare, automotive, transportation and energy.
Mobile carriers around the world expect M2M to be a significant source of growth. Examples already in use include smart meters that monitor energy usage at homes, or devices in offices that tell an owner when their coffee machine needs restocking.
Vodafone said it would offer 1.49 euros a share to buy out the shareholders in the Italian group.
Cobra’s majority shareholder, Intek Group, said in a statement that it had agreed to tender its 51.4 percent stake in Cobra for 74.3 million euros.
“The combination of Vodafone and Cobra will create a new global provider of connected car services,” Erik Brenneis, director of M2M at Vodafone said.
“We plan to invest in the business to offer our automotive and insurance customers a full range of telematics services,” he said.
The deal values Cobra Automotive, which is based in Italy and listed on the Milan stock exchange, at the equivalent of £115 million (US$195 million). The company has operations in Brazil, Britain, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by