AutoStore agrees to buy Logiqs for up to €30 million to add roaming pallet robots

Norwegian warehouse-automation company AutoStore has agreed to buy Logiqs BV, a Dutch maker of roaming robots that store and retrieve pallets, for up to €30 million, it said on Nov. 5. It will pay from existing cash and expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter.

AutoStore is paying for a technology to build into its own system more than for a business to run. Its automation is cube-based storage, and chief product officer Parth Joshi called pallets "an exciting new product and technology area for us." Chief executive Mats Hovland Vikse said Logiqs' technology will "over time" bring roaming pallet storage into the AutoStore platform, and the company will say more as it prepares an expanded commercial release. The scale gap is wide: Logiqs has about 30 customer sites and 60 employees, while AutoStore counts about 2,050 systems at more than 1,350 customers in 68 countries. AutoStore announced the deal with third-quarter results in which revenue rose 38% and order intake 17% from a year earlier, and it raised its full-year revenue guidance to about $750 million.

Logiqs began building its 3D-carrier in 2011 and delivered its first iCUBE project in 2015, at −25°C. Its roots are in greenhouses: it traded as Logiqs Agro inside the Huisman group from 2004 and became independent in 2014, and its website still sells automated greenhouse benching and vertical-farming systems next to the warehouse robots.