Is Teradyne Becoming an Industrial Robotics Stock?

With many new disruptive technologies, you will find few pure-play stocks out there for retail investors to take part in. That’s certainly not the case with robotics however, and we’ve written quite a few articles on investing in robots, from buying robot ETFs to buying Japanese robot stocks. Still, we’re always on the lookout for new opportunities to invest in robotics, and this week one company came across our radar that merits a closer look.

We first came across Teradyne in our article on how to Automate Nearly Anything with Universal Robots. That’s because in 2015, Universal Robots was bought by Teradyne, Inc. (NYSE:TER), a $6.6 billion company which has historically been involved in automatic test equipment for electronics. That may slowly be changing, as just a few days ago Teradyne acquired another startup based out of Odense Denmark called MiR. While that acquisition made the news, Teradyne also made another robotics acquisition in February which was barely even mentioned in the media. Before we talk about these two acquisitions and what they mean for Teradyne, let’s talk about what it is that the company does today.

With a market cap of just under $6.5 billion, Teradyne is primarily “a developer and supplier of