Hyundai has finally taken full control of Boston Dynamics, as advances the South Korean newspaper Maeil Business Newspaper. The movement is a clear warning to surfers: robots are no longer for recording fun videos on the internet doing parkour or turning into pets, they are now preparing to work for real in car factories.
The large companies in the sector are already moving chips to see who dominates this new industrial revolution in a practical way, that is, putting useful robots into their assembly lines as soon as possible to achieve competitive advantage and in this scenario the Korean automobile company has just hit the table.
The purchase. As the South Korean media exclusively reports, Hyundai Motor Group has bought 9.65% of the missing shares of Boston Dynamics for 325 million dollars (about 283 million euros). The person who gets rid of these shares is the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. and does so by taking advantage of an agreement signed in 2021 to activate the sale just before the deadline expired, today, June 20. To fully close the deal, Hyundai would have transferred the RAI institute, a scientific artificial intelligence research center worth $100 million, to SoftBank.
Why is it important. The acquisition is critical because it eliminates the usual frictions of shared management in one fell swoop: Hyundai is the sole owner of 100% of the company, so it can make decisions more quickly and without waiting for anyone. In other words, you can gear up to vertically integrate Boston Dynamics systems into your plants without reaching agreements or sharing roadmaps with outside investors. In addition, having complete control will allow Hyundai to much better prepare Boston Dynamics for its big goal: to start listing and selling shares on the Nasdaq.
Gaining autonomy and agility is essential in the face of aggressive competition from Tesla or Figure AI and of course, China. The Chinese government is investing a lot of public money to encourage its own robotics companies, such as Unitree, to produce units en masse and at low cost, a strategy that in fact it has already applied recently with electric cars or solar panels. With this coup d’état, Hyundai ensures that it safeguards the valuable technology of the American Boston Dynamics in the hands of an allied country.
Context. Boston Dynamics is probably the most famous robotics company in the world and its ownership history has been curious to say the least: it went from being an academic division of MIT to belong to Google in 2013, then he came to Softbank. In 2021, Hyundai was made with the majority of the company. Simultaneously, SoftBank is changing its eggs in the basket: from robotics hardware to AI in several aspects that go to infrastructure with data centers to software.
In detail. Hyundai has been “lucky”: according to Maeil Business Newspaper has closed the agreement to get that last package of shares very cheap thanks to the fact that the cost was already signed and frozen five years ago, before robots became fashionable. In fact, the market value of Boston Dynamics has reached almost 30 trillion won (about 19.8 billion euros) last year.
Internally, the shareholding would be divided as follows: president Euisun Chung retains his 22.6%, while the subsidiaries distribute the rest of the parent company, namely: Hyundai Motor with 28%, Kia with 17.2%, Hyundai Mobis with 11.3% and Hyundai Glovis with 11.25%.
Yes, but. To begin with, this is an exclusive leak: neither Hyundai nor Softbank has officially communicated the transaction. In addition, the automobile company has had to pay a toll: getting rid of the RAI institute, for which Hyundai had invested $424 million in 2022. Hyundai keeps the factories and the body of the robots, but loses control of the brains of the machines.
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Cover | hyundai
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