Konica Minolta to Snap Up Mobotix

Mobotix is the latest brand to succumb to a consolidation trend in the video surveillance market with Konica Minolta announcing the acquisition of the German firm.

Konica Minolta, which wants to diversify away from its struggling office equipment operation, is expecting to pay in the region of 20bn yen (£123m) to 30bn yen (£190m) for a 65% stake in early May.

Mobotix, which arguably suffered from its decision to resist the ONVIF-led consensus around the H.264 video compression standard, specialises in IP surveillance, the capture and analysis of 360-degree images and thermal cameras.

But it’s the company’s expertise in decentralised video management (edge computing) that has apparently grabbed the Japanese imaging giant’s attention.

Rising resolutions (with cameras now achieving 4K and even 7K resolutions) have necessitated ever-larger server capacities. Capable of processing and analysing images themselves – as opposed to sending the images to centralised video management systems – Mobotix cameras place less strain on servers in terms of data storage.

Mobotix products, which generated sales of €80m (£63.2m) in the year ended September 2015, will now be marketed globally via Konica Minolta’s sales channels.

Konica Minolta intends to deploy Mobotix’s image analysis technologies in a wider range of verticals and in more innovative ways, such as monitoring care facilities or monitoring workflow in manufacturing facilities.

Last June, Konica Minolta bought Radiant Vision Systems, an American manufacturer of display-testing equipment, for about 30 billion yen. Konica Minolta emerged from the merger of Konica and Minolta in 2003.

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