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Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

therobotreport.com

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Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#41

Post by abfan1127 »

dmurray wrote: post #33
dhruvarora013 wrote: post #14

Could someone explain why this acquisition makes sense? The core competencies between the two companies seem to have little overlap from my outsider perspective. Is this diversification or does Hyundai make more than automobiles?

Even if Hyundai weren't a diverse conglomerate as several other commenters have pointed out, car manufacturing and robotics have plenty of overlap. Robots are used to make cars. Robots and cars both require precision engineering at a macro scale. Both have lots of electronics and control systems, even leaving out self-driving or autonomous capabilities. For 5% of Hyundai's market cap, I think you can make a case for…

does Hyundai buy assembly robots or make them?

Edit: they make them - https://www.hyundai-robotics.com/

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#43

Post by echelon »

rmah wrote: post #28
dhruvarora013 wrote: post #14

Could someone explain why this acquisition makes sense? The core competencies between the two companies seem to have little overlap from my outsider perspective. Is this diversification or does Hyundai make more than automobiles?

Hyundai is a South Korean chaebol (sort of like a conglomerate). While it was ostensibly restructured into "independent" groups a while back, let's just say that, in practice, they're not really independent in the western sense. In addition to building cars and trucks, Hyundai does the following: * building construction (everything from homes to office and factories) * civil engineering (bridges, dams, shipyards, etc…

This is what Amazon and Apple are trying to become.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#44

Post by Darmody »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #27
Darmody wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We spend way more in software (also online services) than in hardware.

Do cars count as hardware? People spend a lot on those.

That depends on how you look at it.

But it doesn't matter. A car costs a lot, yes, but the margin is not that big. You can't build a car and send the same unit to every buyer. While I can code once and sell the software to a million clients.

Tesla is the most valuable car company in the world and I think it has a lot to do with the software, not only the hardware.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#45

Post by pvarangot »

aussiegreenie wrote: post #5

This just demonstrates the "price gap" between virtual and "real world" companies. An app with a few thousand uses with worth more than one of the world's best engineering companies. Even if either has a path to profitability.

Boston Dynamics is a consulting company that uses some fun pet projects as PR. Consulting is a very tight margin business because it's used as some kind of arbitrage move between workforce and capabilities.

It doesn't matter if you are doing consulting with the most specialized meditation app UI researchers or the most specialized cyber-biology engineers with experience in exobiology and colonizing other celestial bodies. It's still consulting.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#46

Post by mxskelly »

llboston wrote: post #37

I have been secretly hoping Tesla to buy Boston Dynamics and revolutionize autonomous manufacturing. One day, a Starship fleet will send an army of robots to Mars and build out a city.

What makes you think that Tesla would be able to do that, given their reputation of not being able to manufacture cars that don't fall apart immediately upon rolling off the factory line? They kinda have to be able to build cars in the first place in order to build them faster with more robots.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#47

Post by formercoder »

aussiegreenie wrote: post #5

This just demonstrates the "price gap" between virtual and "real world" companies. An app with a few thousand uses with worth more than one of the world's best engineering companies. Even if either has a path to profitability.

Has everything to do with margin, one of the biggest drivers of value.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#48

Post by dang »

mxskelly wrote: post #46
llboston wrote: post #37

I have been secretly hoping Tesla to buy Boston Dynamics and revolutionize autonomous manufacturing. One day, a Starship fleet will send an army of robots to Mars and build out a city.

What makes you think that Tesla would be able to do that, given their reputation of not being able to manufacture cars that don't fall apart immediately upon rolling off the factory line? They kinda have to be able to build cars in the first place in order to build them faster with more robots.

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. The GP comment may have been lightweight but this is basically trolling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've already been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit with this account. Can you please not? Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333233 are particularly not ok here.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#49

Post by WhompingWindows »

ialyos wrote: post #11
aussiegreenie wrote: post #5

This just demonstrates the "price gap" between virtual and "real world" companies. An app with a few thousand uses with worth more than one of the world's best engineering companies. Even if either has a path to profitability.

Agreed. Robots are very hard, and Boston Dynamics has been around for almost 40 years and still isn't anywhere close to making a lot of money. Apps have added a lot more value to my life than BD ever has. Fwiw I interviewed with BD a few years ago, and am focusing on robotics, so I'd like the opposite to be true

Computation existed for more than 40 years before apps started making a ton of money on it. If BD develops robotic platform-"workers" that can be trained in 5 seconds to do any manual labor, that's the new "app" that one would be making money off of in the future.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#50

Post by lemax »

nwsm wrote: post #34
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #32

This should be very interesting, I'm not clear on the relationships after their split but Hyundai has a huge reach across every sort of heavy industry you can think of. I found another article that says it is the motor division that is acquiring Boston Dynamics. I'm surprised the US allowed this, Boston Dynamics seems like the sort of company they would keep close to home. https://www.kedglobal.com/newsView/ked202012…

What reason would there be to disallow it?

National security, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (Cfius), has gone as far as requiring the repatriation of Grindr after it approved a deal for it to go to a Chinese company.

https://www.ft.com/content/30408b0e-50e2-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626...

edit: not the FTC, it was Cfius

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