Teledyne buying FLIR, what does it mean for Raymarine?
Teledyne Technologies and Flir have announced that Teledyne will buy FLIR for 7.36 billion dollars. This is certainly an interesting development given FLIR’s March 2020 announcement that they wanted to sell Raymarine. That was followed a few months later by an announcement that the sale was being paused due to market conditions related to Covid-19. Now, FLIR itself is being acquired by imaging and technology company Teledyne, so the next logical question is what does this mean for Raymarine?
I’m not a business analyst and I don’t have a crystal ball, so these are just my thoughts. FLIR was exploring the sale of Raymarine because they are a small part of their annual revenue, and as a primarily consumer-focused company, don’t fit with FLIR’s focus on commercial/industrial and defense business. Teledyne’s primary focus is very similar to FLIR’s so I don’t think this represents a change for the long haul.
Flir’s decision to pause the sale was driven by the tightening of the broader mergers and acquisitions market as a pandemic gripped the world, so I think most people saw this as a temporary pause, not a change of direction for FLIR. But, at the same time, Raymarine has turned out new and updated products that show a serious commitment to research and development.
Raymarine’s products have benefitted from FLIR’s sensor competence. Raymarine MFDs handle cameras better than any of their competitors, offer impressive augmented reality capabilities, and can be integrated into collision avoidance systems. Teledyne has strong LIDAR capabilities which, if Raymarine remains part of the combined Teledyne and FLIR, could give Raymarine a leg up using LIDAR to build even more advanced capabilities.
As Ben Ellison mentioned when he first covered the potential Raymarine sale, this doesn’t appear to be a sale of a company in trouble nor is the seller in trouble. When the original announcement was made, Raymarine and FLIR communicated that it would continue to be business as usual while the sale proceeded. In the ten months since then, that’s exactly what we’ve seen and at this point I would expect that to continue. Hopefully Raymarine finds a good home in the future but for the time being I don’t see reason for concern about their health or the purchase of their products.
