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The E-Commerce company continues it's rise in connected home products and even further, surveillance. Amazon is buying Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7 billion. There are more than 40 million of the robots in peoples' homes, with millions of them being sold directly on Amazon's site. Since the acquisition was announce, $AMZN is up almost 4%.
Photo: Google Finance
While this is a strong business play for Amazon and Jeff Bezos, many analyst and market leaders are claiming this is "may be the most dangerous, threatening acquisition in the company's history."
What people don't realize is that Roomba is more than just a vacuum company. Advanced Roomba vacuums have internal mapping technology that learns the floor plan of users' homes. The devices can also "adapt to and remember" up to 10 different floor plans "so users can carry their robot to another floor or a separate home, where the robot will recognize its location and clean as instructed," according to iRobot. Some models even have low-resolution cameras to avoid obstacles and aid in mapping.
If you look at the rest of Amazon's portfolio, you can start seeing the pattern that is painting them as "Big Brother". They acquired Ring in 2018, which is the video doorbell and camera company. The own Eero, the Wifi Router company, and also launched their own platform of Alexa, which controls all of your smart devices within your home.
Between Amazon acquiring an already established market share, not a startup, and gaining access to massive amounts of data, the market monopoly of the company is putting people into a frenzy this week.
We will see if the deal goes through, because it hasn't been approved by US Federal Trade Commission regulators yet, who could possibly terminate the deal under antitrust laws.
But as for now, Jeff Bezos wins this round. Hopefully he can help me win some more bets with my Roomba (no free ads).