They bought mobilEye because MobilEye and Intel had signed a deal with BMW to produce autonomous vehicles. To quote their press release
> BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts become a reality. The three leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.
Needless to say - a few years of toiling away and it turned out that this was not going to happen the way Intel had hoped. In fact if you go and look at BMW's website about autonomous driving it's almost comical that their list of acheivements stop the year before that deal was signed.
I'm not saying MobilEye aren't doing decent stuff (and they've certainly done a fantastic job of staying independent of Intel) but they've done nothing like what was expected of them. It's also important to remember that the bundling and strategic acquisitions Intel make often masks how successful they really are in a business - it'll often turn out the design win is more about bundling a bunch of services together rather than actually beating out competition.
Sure, this isn't living up to earlier estimates, but everyone in this field has been way behind early estimates, often by years. I think Mobileye revenue was up >100% last quarter? Obviously pandemic recovery helps, but even without it, 50+% seems likely.
If they can keep having failures like that, investors are going to be really happy with the outcome.
The entire strategic partnership that caused Intel to buy MobilEye disintegrated and now MobilEye are trying to resurrect it with a Chinese car manufacturer on their own.
>. I think Mobileye revenue was up >100% last quarter?
As I say, they're doing fine. It's nothing like what they promised to do, and the company has restructured in a way that clearly indicates they'll be spun out in the next 24 months (like Mcafee). But the premise of the "big bets" wasn't shuffling at the edges, it was meant to be the future of Intel, and that's clearly failed at this point.
> BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts become a reality. The three leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.
Needless to say - a few years of toiling away and it turned out that this was not going to happen the way Intel had hoped. In fact if you go and look at BMW's website about autonomous driving it's almost comical that their list of acheivements stop the year before that deal was signed.
I'm not saying MobilEye aren't doing decent stuff (and they've certainly done a fantastic job of staying independent of Intel) but they've done nothing like what was expected of them. It's also important to remember that the bundling and strategic acquisitions Intel make often masks how successful they really are in a business - it'll often turn out the design win is more about bundling a bunch of services together rather than actually beating out competition.