Tag: self driving

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Business Tech

Uber and Yandex Spin Out Russian self-driving car subsidiary into its own entity

uber russia

Uber and Yandex will be spinning off their self-driving car subsidiary into its own entity – MLU BV.

MLU BV will have $150 million in new capital from Yandex, including $100 million in equity and $50 million as a convertible loan.

In connection with the deal, Yandex will hold 61.7% of MLU and Uber will own 33.5%. Bloomberg reported in June that Yandex had been looking to buy all of Uber’s initial 38% stake as an alternative to taking the taxi business public. Uber merged its Russian operations with Moscow-based Yandex in 2017.

Categories
Business Tech

In what ways is Google Waymo a threat to Tesla and its Self Driving Technology?

waymo_minivan_HP

Waymo at present has a private valuation that is twice as high as Tesla.

How can this be?

Margins! Tesla is focused on the full production of the car where Waymo is focused purely on the underlying technology with self driving cars. Thus, Waymo will have a Gross Margin that is extremely high in comparison to Tesla.

Eric Schmidt talked about this a lot. How Google and its products always wanted to be focused on providing the technology sub stack instead of the full product as it keeps margins at a high level and thus maximising value.