Advantech Co Ltd (研華), the nation’s biggest industrial computer maker, yesterday said it plans to acquire a US industrial networking company for about US$1 million in cash in to boost its position in the global Internet of Things market.
Advantech said it has signed an agreement with private equity fund Graham Partners to take over B+B SmartWorx Inc, a private company with an annual revenue of about US$55 million.
This is the latest and the biggest acquisition by Advantech in its drive to seek new growth.
Advantech formed a task force five years ago to seek potential acquisition targets that would aid long-term expansion, it said.
“We have been searching for acquisition targets to expand our Internet of Things business... Taking over B+B SmartWorx would be a crucial step for the company in its expansion into the market,” Advantech president Chaney Ho (何春盛) told a media briefing.
Wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and 4G long-term evolution (LTE) are becoming more important as they are used by Internet of Things devices, Ho said.
B+B SmartWorx has developed fiber-optic and LTE routers, which Advantech has not, he said.
Over the next three to five years, the acquisition should help boost Advantech’s industrial networking revenue to between US$200 million and US$300 million per year, making the firm the world’s largest industrial networking product supplier by market share, Ho said.
The company makes US$25 million a year from its industrial networking products, he said.
The acquisition of B+B SmartWorx would also help Advantech gain a firmer foothold in the US, Europe and the Middle East, as the company has strong brand awareness and extensive channel networks in those markets, he added.
Advantech expects a positive impact on its operations from the deal to become noticeable from the second quarter of next year, given B+B SmartWorx’s gross margin of 50 percent, compared with Advantech’s 40 percent gross margin in the first three quarters.
Advantech plans to apply for a bank loan from US lenders to use alongside its own funds to pay for the acquisition, it said.
HSBC Securities analyst Jenny Lai (賴惠娟) said in a report that she is “upbeat on the long-term outlook of Internet of Things applications and believe Adventech’s software investment would only strengthen the company’s long-term competitiveness as none of its competitors have acquired a comparable capability yet.”
Lai has a “Buy” rating on Advantech with a target price of NT$263, expecting almost 26 percent growth in the next 12 months, with the stock closing at NT$208.5 yesterday.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google’s annual cloud conference that artificial intelligence (AI) agents — human-like digital assistants — are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize AI. At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that started yesterday, Pichai and key Google executives aim to position the company’s AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry’s most reliable revenue stream. Mountain View, California-based Google yesterday announced that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name “Gemini Enterprise.” Most notably, that involves rebranding and
RSS