TIDMOCDO
RNS Number : 6620V
Ocado Group PLC
16 April 2021
London, 16 April 2021
Ocado Group plc
OCADO INVESTS IN AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE SOFTWARE COMPANY OXBOTICA;
ANNOUNCES PLANS TO DEVELOP A RANGE OF VEHICLES THAT WILL BE
INTEGRATED INTO THE OCADO SMART PLATFORM.
Ocado Group plc ("Ocado"), the leading online grocery platform
and solutions provider, today announces that it has commercially
partnered with Oxbotica Ltd. ("Oxbotica"), headquartered in
Oxford.
The purpose of this partnership is to collaborate on hardware
and software interfaces for autonomous vehicles, enhancing and
integrating Oxbotica's autonomy software platform into a variety of
vehicles. The use cases range from vehicles that operate inside of
Ocado's Customer Fulfilment Centre ("CFC") buildings and the yard
areas that surround them, all the way to last-mile deliveries and
kerb-to-kitchen robots. This will be a multi-year collaboration,
and the ultimate ambition is to enable Ocado's partners that use
the Ocado Smart Platform ("OSP") to reduce the costs of last-mile
delivery and other logistics operations.
The Ocado/Oxbotica relationship began in 2017, when we conducted
a two-week trial using an early prototype delivery vehicle doing
autonomous deliveries in Greenwich, London. Since that initial
trial, Oxbotica has made significant progress in developing its
platform, leading to today's announcement of a broader relationship
that includes both Ocado's financial investment and a commercial
collaboration agreement.
Oxbotica's two core products are Selenium and Caesium. Selenium
is an on-vehicle suite of software that brings full autonomy to a
vehicle in a way that is agnostic to both hardware and environment.
Caesium is a cloud-based autonomy management system that brings
fine-grained control, audit, data management and monitoring to
autonomous fleets. Oxbotica's products use an advanced set of AI,
machine learning and optimisation technologies to yield a
low-power, safe, explainable, quick-to-deploy, modular and
completely flexible "Universal Autonomy" platform.
Ocado will build teams of engineers within its existing Advanced
Technology division to work with Oxbotica on these diverse use
cases. The Advanced Technology division is independent from the
engineering team that develops core OSP software and automation.
The initial development work will focus on UK operations, and will
then extend to international markets where Ocado's partners
operate.
Over the last five years Ocado has created more than 8,000 new
jobs in the UK and abroad, with headcount now approaching 19,000
employees. As with its robotics business, this vehicle autonomy
programme is not expected to have any impact on Ocado's current
hiring or employment levels within logistics or operations
groups.
Logistics costs constitute the single-largest line item in the
operating cost structure of online grocery. Moving finished orders
from CFCs to 'spokes' (where they are then cross-docked to delivery
vans) represents approximately 1.5% of sales in the UK; the cost of
final mile delivery is approximately 10% of sales. Labour
represents approximately 50% of these costs.
Beyond potential cost savings within its core operations(1) ,
Ocado sees significant opportunities to improve its partners'
customer proposition by being better able to respond to peak
delivery demands, reducing the cost-to-serve of its immediacy
proposition, and accelerating the shift to electrically-powered
vehicles (thereby improving fleet sustainability and reducing
environmental impact).
For both regulatory and complexity reasons, Ocado expects that
the development of vehicles that operate in low-speed urban areas
or in restricted access areas, such as inside its CFC buildings or
within its CFC yards, may become a reality sooner than
fully-autonomous deliveries to consumers' homes. However, all
aspects of autonomous vehicle development will be within the scope
of this collaboration. Ocado expects to see the first prototypes of
some early use cases for autonomous vehicles within two years.
In addition to this collaboration with Oxbotica, Ocado continues
to seek further investments and/or partnerships as it grows and
develops its autonomous vehicle capabilities.
Main Transaction Terms
Ocado will invest GBP10m in Oxbotica as part of Oxbotica's
latest Series B equity funding round. The round was led by bp
ventures, and included other strategic and financial investors in
the U.S., the U.K., China and Australia, such as Tencent, Halma,
BGF, HostPlus, IP Group, Venture Science, and funds advised by Doxa
Partners. Ocado will take a seat on Oxbotica's board.
As part of this collaboration, Ocado will outfit a subset of its
delivery vans and warehouse vehicles with data capture
capabilities, which may include video cameras, LiDAR, RADAR and
other sensing devices. Ocado will make this data available to
Oxbotica to train and test its technologies, which will then inform
Ocado as to what opportunities exist and where best it might take
advantage of these exciting new partnerships.
Alex Harvey, Chief of Advanced Technology at Ocado,
commented:
"We are excited about the opportunity to work with Oxbotica to
develop a wide range of autonomous solutions that truly have the
potential to transform both our and our partners' CFC and service
delivery operations, while also giving all end customers the widest
range of options and flexibility."
Paul Newman, Co-Founder & CTO of Oxbotica, commented:
"This is an excellent opportunity for Oxbotica and Ocado to
strengthen our partnership, sharing our vision for the future of
autonomy. By combining both companies' cutting-edge knowledge and
resources, we hope to bring our Universal Autonomy vision to life
and continue to solve some of the world's most complex autonomy
challenges."
Notes to Editors
Contacts
-- David Shriver, Director of Communications, Ocado Group plc, on 01707 228 000
-- Martin Robinson, Tulchan Communications, on 020 7353 4200
About Ocado Group
Ocado Group is a UK based technology company admitted to trading
on the London Stock Exchange (Ticker OCDO). It provides end-to-end
online grocery fulfilment solutions to some of the world's largest
grocery retailers. It created the award-winning UK online grocery
business Ocado.com, which is now a 50:50 joint venture with Marks
& Spencer. Ocado has spent two decades innovating for online
grocery, investing in a wide technology estate that includes
robotics, AI & machine learning, simulation, forecasting, and
edge intelligence.
About Oxbotica
Oxbotica is a global leader in autonomous vehicle software.
Oxbotica was founded in 2014 as an Oxford University spin-out with
a simple mission to develop autonomy software that will transform
all industries where people and goods move. Oxbotica's autonomy
software works with any vehicle, any time, and in any place. This
is Universal Autonomy.
Oxbotica's autonomous vehicle software is deployed across
multiple industries, bringing the benefits of autonomy to
enterprises globally. Oxbotica is building an ecosystem that
supports the adoption of autonomous vehicles, leveraging key
partnerships to accelerate the deployment of Universal
Autonomy.
(1) The extent to which these costs can ultimately be reduced
through automation (if any) will depend on a wide variety of
factors, including vehicle cost, penetration rates and how orders
are ultimately moved from vehicles to (or picked up by) end
customers.
The person responsible for arranging the release of this
announcement is:
Neill Abrams
Group General Counsel and Company Secretary
Ocado Group plc
Buildings One & Two Trident Place
Mosquito Way
Hatfield
Hertfordshire
AL10 9UL
Tel: +44 (0)1707 228 000
Email: company.secretary@ocado.com
Cautionary statement
Certain statements contained in this announcement constitute
"forward-looking statements" with respect to the financial
condition, performance, strategic initiatives, objectives, results
of operations and business of the Ocado group. All statements other
than statements of historical facts included in this announcement
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