Roomba being purchased on Amazon… I mean *by* Amazon
It was announced this morning that iRobot, the makers of Roomba, is being acquired by Amazon for about $1.7b USD. This, perhaps is the only valid reason that the PR team did not return my inquiry about entering a Roomba into our clash of vacuuming robots.
This comes on the heels of iRobot having a downturn of a quarter year over year after they only made $255.4 million – a 30% drop over the previous year’s quarter, or about $2.8 million dollars a day.
This downturn came about (reads notes) because of cancelled orders due to supply chain issues and delays.
As they’re only making a few million a day, they announced in the investor news they were “the company is accelerating actions to shift certain non-core engineering functions to lower-cost regions and increasingly leverage its joint design manufacturing (JDM) partners” read: outsourcing, getting another MFG to make their product and slapping the iRobot brand sticker on it.
It was announced in May they were cutting about 10% of the workforce, or about 140 employees.
Basically they didn’t earn as much for the investors, time to freak out and ruin the company much like Netflix has done, and now it’s time to sell everything to Amazon and dump many of the people who probably made iRobot a thing.
I’ll refrain from all the Amazon Sucks marketing slogans possible here, which is extremely difficult because I just purchased a fan for work and the innuendo-laden commentary is ripe for the picking.
Thanks for the tip Ben!
[CNBC]
