Xiaomi will buy autonomous driving technology startup Deepmotion for about $77.4 million, sealing a deal to help further its ambitions of getting into the fast-expanding field.
Gizmochina reported that Xiaomi will acquire Chinese autonomous driving startup Deepmotion for about $77.37 million.
DeepMotion was established in July 2017 in Beijing. Their registered capital at that time was around USD $10 million and the company is represented by Li Zhiwei. The company mainly provides automatic driving solutions with high-precision maps as its core and has a number of patents related to automatic driving.
The company announced the acquisition after reporting better-than-expected results for the second quarter when a recovery in key markets like India helped it overtake Apple Inc. to become the world’s second-largest phone vendor by shipments. Revenue surged 64% to 87.79 billion yuan ($13.6 billion) in the quarter ended June, surpassing the 85.01 billion yuan average of estimates.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Lei Jun is now spearheading a drive to take Xiaomi beyond smartphones. The 51-year-old is personally leading a project to make electric vehicles and the company has pledged an initial investment of $10 billion over the next decade in the business. Lei has said the company has deep enough pockets to fund such a project, which requires years of heavy investment in development and manufacturing before the first car can even be sold.
The news follows Xiaomi’s announcement in March that it will invest $10 billion over the next 10 years into its upcoming electric vehicle business. “Xiaomi hopes to offer quality smart electric vehicles to let everyone in the world enjoy smart living anytime, anywhere,” the company said in a statement at the time.
President Wang Xiang said Wednesday the purchase is intended to help Xiaomi develop Level 4 self-driving technology, which allows full autonomous driving. “Through this acquisition, we hope to shorten the time to market for our product,” Wang told reporters after releasing results. “We want to speed up our autonomous driving R&D.”
On Wednesday, Xiaomi reported net income climbed more than 80% to 8.27 billion yuan in the three months ended June. It seized the No. 2 position globally for the first time during the quarter, in part after shipments in India almost doubled from a year earlier, according to reports from research firm IDC.
Also Read:
