What Does Bobcat’s Planned Merger Mean For Their Excavators?

Over the past year, Bobcat excavators have started to be designed with a fairly distant future in mind.

The RogueX and RogueX2 concept excavators highlighted a vision of a possible future, but a recent and somewhat controversial merger between Doosan Bobcat and a South Korean autonomous machine manufacturer shows just how far the company plans to go in this new direction.

The plan is for Doosan Bobcat to merge with Doosan Robotics to become a fully owned subsidiary under the Doosan Group umbrella and be a major part of one of the three pillars of the company.

In this context, the newly-merged Bobcat would become a huge part of the Smart Machine part of the business, which alongside Clean Energy and Advanced Materials would form the entirety of the Doosan Group going forward.

This highlights that Doosan only sees a future for autonomous heavy machinery, which could make the RogueX concept the norm rather than a clean room ambition, although at first, the focus would be on integrating smart technology and artificial intelligence into existing Bobcat products.

This is in spite of the significant financial success and revenue generation of Bobcat as it currently exists and it is in this success that a lot of controversy has emerged when it comes to the merger plan.

The initial intention was for Bobcat and Doosan Robotics to merge via a stock swap agreement at a ratio where Bobcat shares are worth two-thirds the value of Doosan Robotics stock (0.63 to 1), making Doosan Robotics stock more valuable despite Bobcat’s present success.

The situation caused so much controversy and accusations of market manipulation in Seoul that the Financial Supervisory Service ordered Doosan to suspend their prospectus, something almost unheard of when it came to merging two subsidiary components of the same company.

This has effectively forced a halt on the merger for now, but the intention is clear that Bobcat as a subsidiary of Doosan would aim to be far closer to its vision of the future than even many futurists suspected.