News English — Warehouse

NRF2024 was a full return to normal following the pandemic. Visitor numbers back to full force. Very few if any at all exhibitor cancellations. New food innovation zone and some exciting MHE displays. Overall, a lack of excitement despite all the AI talk.

DECLINING VALUATIONS? REALLY? We recently heard Clearpath Robotics/Otto Motors was acquired by Rockwell (source) and thought that perhaps valuations had been affected by the massive decline in valuation of 6 River Systems. 6 River Systems (link) was founded in 2015 by ex-Kiva Systems (acquired by Amazon in 2012) people and was acquired by Shopify in 2019 for $450m (source). In 2023, Shopify's change of strategy led them to divest 6 River Systems for $12.7m (source), representing a 35X value destruction. STIQ's inital thought was that this may affect valuations in the wider automation sector, but it appears the Shopify divestment was viewed as...

Following a visit to LogiMAT 2023 in Stuttgart, Germany it became clear that the Cube Storage sector, pioneered by AutoStore in the 1990's, has become increasingly attractive to many different companies. There appeared to be an influx of startups and legacy companies targeting the Cube Storage sector and some of the people we talked to confirmed this impression from the April trade show. Most of these vendors are European, mainly from Germany and Netherlands. Note also that these companies targeted the Cube Storage space from a variety of angles, i.e. for storage or for transportation, etc. Volume Lagertechnik had developed a robot with...

A review of Promat 2023, warehouse automation and material handling trade show held in Chicago bi-annually.

Amazon $1bn Industrial Innovation Fund announcement