M&A news

Guppy, Marlin, Pike, Stingray – someone at AVT clearly has a penchant for fishy names. Such a pity then that Dalsa have the Piranha because that would have made a great mascot for the acquisitive German camera company.

The Piranha is of course a voracious carnivore, gobbling up smaller competitors, and that’s what AVT have done with their purchase of VDS Vosskühler. This comes on the heels of the Prosilica acquisition a couple of years back and seems like it should be a good fit. VDS works mainly in the infrared while AVT products are all intended for visible light imaging. I suspect that VDS will also bring some significant technical expertise, so this will only strengthen AVT’s competitive position.

I’d like to claim that I had foreshadowed this in my January 20th posting, “Too many camera manufacturers?” but in all honestly I will admit that VDS wasn’t on my list of mainstream machine vision camera companies. I would like to think though that it shows I have my finger on the pulse of our industry.

Check back soon for my next prediction!