Supply chain technology provider Zebra Technologies Corp. today announced plans to acquire the machine vision component and system developer Matrox Imaging for $875 million in a bid to expand its offerings in automation technology.
Under terms of the deal, Zebra will acquire the Matrox Imaging division (Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd.) but not the Matrox Video division (Matrox Graphics Inc.), which will remain under the ownership of Matrox President and Co-Founder Lorne Trottier. Both units will keep their head offices in Montreal.
The deal follows Zebra’s move last year to launch a fixed industrial scanning and machine vision portfolio by acquiring the machine vision system vendor Adaptive Vision and the autonomous mobile robot (AMR) vendor Fetch Robotics.
In other recent investments, Zebra and its investment arm, Zebra Ventures, in 2021 teamed with other venture capital firms to back logistics tech firms such as Righthand Robotics, Optoro, PlusOne Robotics, and FourKites.
Montreal-based Matrox Imaging offers platform-independent software, software development kits (SDKs), smart cameras, 3D sensors, vision controllers, input/output (I/O) cards, and industrial vision frame grabbers.
According to Zebra, those components enable industrial customers to lower their cost to manufacture products, improve product quality, and increase compliance and yield. Matrox does a brisk business in its sector, generating annual sales of approximately $100 million with a higher profit margin profile than Zebra, the firms said.
“Customers are increasingly deploying automated solutions to augment their front-line workers, enabling them to focus on more complex, higher value workflows, and machine vision is a key technology to help them get there,” Zebra CEO Anders Gustafsson said in a release. “This acquisition enables us to meet our customers' evolving needs, regardless of where they are on their automation journey—from capturing and analyzing data to facilitate decision-making to deploying physical automation solutions to accelerate the production and movement of goods and materials.”
