Samsung Completes $8 Billion Acquisition of Harman International
Another tech company working towards making cars smarter.
Intel may have just confirmed an acquisition of Mobileye for the purposes of moving autonomous cars forward, but they're far from the only tech company looking to make vehicles smarter. Back in November, Samsung announced plans to acquire auto parts supplier Harman International Industries for $8 billion — the company's biggest acquisition to date. Now that deal has finally been completed.
Harman International does a lot of work on connected-car technology, and is the parent company of Infinity, JBL, Lexicon, Mark Levinson, and the Harman Kardon audio brand. Speaking on the acquisition, Harman president Dinesh Paliwal said, "Samsung provides Harman with the scale, platform and complementary technologies to accelerate growth and extend our global market leadership in automotive, smart audio and connected technologies....Samsung and Harman will define – and drive – the future of automotive."
This could prove to be a pretty big deal, not just for Samsung, but for the push towards autonomous cars in general. Samsung generally tends to do things in-house if possible, and prior to this its largest acquisition was of AST in 1996 for $840 million, and it ended up having to close the division soon after. For Samsung to be reaching out after so long and for so substantial an amount is definitely something worth noting.
