I wonder if this is because of the SoftBank cash crunch. Or if it's just nobody has figured out how to make money with Boston Dynamics. Though if the 1 billion sale price is true, maybe flipping BD is the only way to make money with it.
> In early November, Bloomberg first reported that Hyundai was in talks to acquire Boston Dynamics from Tokyo-based SoftBank Group. The Japanese conglomerate is selling off non-core business assets after it was hit hard by a series of soured bets, including WeWork and Uber. In September 2020, Softbank sold Arm to NVIDIA for $40 billion.
I'm not sure that is or was ever in the plans for SoftBank. "Pump and dump" gets thrown around a lot, but hasn't that been their model? Get in as early your massive dollars allow, promote the hell outta the company, feed the tech/SV/VC ecosystem, cash out, repeat.
And, for the record, the rich aren't getting better returns than the rest of us--the S&P beats the vast majority of Hedge Funds, year after year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/active-fund-managers-trail-t...
That's clearly an absurdity and not physically possible.
Whatbwe do know is that every time we have QE 90% of the money ends up in financial markets, not real economy. This is a well known problem, and Yanis Varufakis has talked about it at length
And yet the market has averaged a 7% annual return since 1870.
It's going to be fun when the "just buy an index and you'll be fine" strategy falters (in this case a cap-weighted, large US company index that buys shares at any price). The S&P500 isn't diverse like they talk about in finance textbooks. There are quite a few years in that article you linked where hedge funds beat the index (2001-2005, 2007, 2009, 2010). It's almost as if who beats whom is random...
With index funds and ETFs everywhere, it is quite common to be average. It's also far easier to buy an all-market index fund/ETF than to pick stocks or active funds.
> You can gain 100% many times, but lose it only once.
True of all investments.
>It's going to be fun when the "just buy an index and you'll be fine" strategy falters (in this case a cap-weighted, large US company index that buys shares at any price). The S&P500 isn't diverse like they talk about in finance textbooks. There are quite a few years in that article you linked where hedge funds beat the index (2001-2005, 2007, 2009, 2010). It's almost as if who beats whom is random...
Not over the long run. From the same article, "After 10 years, 85 percent of large cap funds underperformed the S&P 500, and after 15 years, nearly 92 percent are trailing the index."
The high stock market and the high prices for building are more the true inflation than a true plus on the market.
Stocks for the Long Run and all that
This does sound like shedding off bets that didn't quite live up to the expectation, and making a small[0] profit off of it.
[0] Small in the eye of Softbank. If you have a $100B fund and got 0.7B profit, those 0.7% are going to move your needle very much.
Also..historically robotics companies get acquired by Asian companies because that’s where manufacture and production is happening. Also..in America, we are not as tech forward and don’t embrace robots on our intersections like they’d do in Asia..China, Singapore, Japan, Korea etc.
Can you imagine if SPOT mini went around asking people to mask up in American public parks? But Singapore deployed SPOT minis during covid and no one batted an eyelid.
When I approached my city’s PD and FD to acquire a couple of SPOT minis, I got a response that I wish I can share here..but sadly I can’t.. suffice to say that it was jaw dropping. With calls for defunding police departments, they are already on financial survival mode.. high tech will never reach American cities never mind be well adopted as in Asian cities.
KUKA for example became a Chinese company and was bought out for a pittance. At least Boston Dynamics had a good valuation. I guess SoftBank in America are better deal makers than German KUKA.
I have consistently been amazed by the demise and/or sell off of robotics companies for cheap. If the $1 billion number is true, I think that would be the highest number for an acquisition for a robotics company.