An “opportunistic acquisition” is how CNH’s chief digital and information officer describes the company’s agreement to acquire Hemisphere GNSS for US$175 million.
It manufactures satellite positioning technology including Outback Guidance and is owned by Unistrong, which is incorporated in China.
“If they weren’t available, the ability for us to go acquire another existing provider would have just cost us a lot more, and we may not have had that opportunity,” said Marc Kermisch of CNH.
“Some of our competitors have moved down that path much earlier than we did, and we’ve seen the benefits of that, and that’s kind of what led to the acquisition of Hemisphere.”
Hemisphere’s global navigation satellite system (GNSS) supports the agriculture, construction, mining and marine industries with electronic systems and software. Its technology includes application-specific integrated circuit chips, circuit boards, radio frequency signal processing, navigation algorithms and satellite-based correction.
Kermisch said the acquisition will help CNH advance automated and autonomous solutions for agriculture and construction applications, noting CNH has worked with the technology in the past through Raven Industries.
“It’s similar to the same reasons we’ve acquired Raven and Augmenta and Hemisphere. It’s really building that vertical supply chain for our tech stack, to be able to service our customers better,” Kermisch said.
“When you look at Raven, their specialty was guidance, steering and spraying, and then they were also building and moving very quickly in that autonomy tech stack. Bringing Hemisphere in to be the GNSS provider for both Raven and CNH now allows us to hone that and advance that technology capability at the pace our customers need us to, specific for their missions.”
He said there are three significant ways Hemisphere will bolster CNH’s capabilities. The first is to have a higher level of accuracy from the satellite to the vehicle and its location, to help control where that vehicle is, and then use that data in conjunction with Raven CNH and Augmenta to drive actions at the implement.
The second way involves its radio network base stations that provide RTK corrections. The stations will supplement the satellite network to provide better accuracy.
““With that 1.5-centimetre level accuracy, and then being able to couple that with the vision capabilities that Raven and Augmenta are going to provide to us, it allows us to combine that GNS data with the vision data to be able to give the accuracy for plant level care,” Kermisch said.
The third way is related to the machine control capability developed by Hemisphere.
“Hemisphere has some steering capabilities. Also, within the construction realm, it has blade control capabilities for dozer or graders,” Kermisch said.
“There’s some machine automation and control that we’re going to be able to commercialize more primarily in construction than on the ag side, and those are complementary to the tech stack that Raven has, because Raven and CNH historically (have) not done a lot of machine control in construction and so this allows us to do that.”
He said CNH plans to close the acquisition of Hemisphere later this summer.
