Amazon buys Belgian robotics group Cloostermans-Huwaert

Yahoo Finance Live checks out Amazon's move to acquire the Belgian robotics outfit Cloostermans-Huwaert.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: All right, my play today is Amazon, ramping up its robotics business. News today that it's buying Cloostermans. That's a company that specializes in warehouse machinery and robotics. So here, it's putting a little bit more money and putting a little bit more emphasis on the R&D aspect of that industry. Amazon very familiar with this business. They've been a customer of Cloostermans since 2019.

The deal builds on Amazon's recent momentum in this space. Amazon launched an innovation lab last year that focused on new ergonomic technologies and announced a series of new robotic technologies, including the first fully autonomous mobile robot that maneuvers around employees without being restricted to certain areas.

And Dave, you and I have talked a number of times just about Amazon getting bigger and bigger and bigger-- healthcare space, in the grocery space. Robotics space, obviously, an industry that they've been interested in now for quite some time. But this really has a potential to advance their warehouses and make them even bigger here in the future.

DAVE BRIGGS: I have some societal concerns that I'll circle back to, but today--

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, and impact on labor force, too.

DAVE BRIGGS: Today there was a couple of privacy groups that actually wrote a letter to Amazon, criticizing their purchase of iRobot that owns Roomba because of the enormous amount of personal data that they continue to build there.

And then circling back to the healthcare acquisitions they continue to make-- this is not an investor question, but a societal one-- as they accumulate data about all of us and then enter the healthcare, get further into the healthcare space, at some point, do federal regulators, if not all the rest of us, have to be tremendously concerned about those two things overlapping. Are you?

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, I'm concerned about it, I guess. I think there certainly is questions about whether or not some of these recent acquisitions are going to get regulatory approval, to your exact point. So I think at some point, you have to say, hey, this is getting a little bit too big. They have a little bit too much data. They're in too many industries, and not so much a competitive--

DAVE BRIGGS: We shall see.

SEANA SMITH: --rate for the--