Advantech will invest 1,004,310 common shares of Nippon RAD, equivalent to 19 percent of the total voting shares, at a price of $303 million. Through this equity investment, Nippon RAD will officially become a co-creation partner of Advantech’s industrial IoT (IIoT) sector in Japan. Advantech has recently invested 12 million shares of Winmate private placement common stock and had teamed up with five more companies to create the Industry 4.0-focused Edgecross Consortium.
Advantech and Nippon RAD officially form a strategic alliance on a co-creation model between a platform provider and a system integrator, aiming to expand the business scope in IIoT and machine-to-intelligence (M2I) sectors in Japan. In addition to product and technology support, Advantech will cooperate with Nippon RAD in jointly marketing WISE-PaaS and solution-ready platform (SRP) technologies in Japan. Nippon RAD will become the WISE-PaaS Competence Center in Japan and will adopt Advantech’s IIoT, WISE-PaaS and SRP products to fulfill projects and meet market demand in Japan, especially in smart factory and Industry 4.0 application markets.
According to Advantech, Japan is its strategic market for IoT business opportunities and that by teaming up with Nippon RAD, Advantech will increase its business potential in Japan’s IIoT market.
"As one of the earliest trailblazing system integrators in Japan, Nippon RAD has been pursuing and pioneering challenging business areas requiring high levels of proficiency in both hardware and software," said Ryuichi Ohtsuka, founder and Chairman of Nippon RAD. "As we have faced a recent upsurge in the IoT sector, especially on IIoT and M2I, we foresee great opportunities and have sought after good partnerships while independently providing technology services here. Since we started working with Advantech, we have achieved a lot in a short time and have come to believe that Advantech will be a great partner in the IIoT market in Japan. This combination of our integration and Advantech’s solutions will allow us to co-create significant revenue growth in the foreseeable future."
