Toshiba To Acquire Smart Grid Tech Firm, Landis+Gyr, For $2.3 Billion
Summary
While Toshiba sells hardware used by utilities — in substations, on poles and transmission lines, for example — this is their first major move to grab a piece of the energy management business on the metering and consumer side. It also prepared to go public last year, at one point hiring Morgan Stanley and Jeffries & Co. to do so, with an alleged goal for a $3 billion valuation reported Fortune’s Dan Primack, then. Silver Spring Networks already counts large North American utilities like Florida Power & Light, and Pacific Gas & Electric among its customers. One challenge in this market — there are a lot of big, smart grid investments to be made — is that growth is likely to happen in waves, by region. Gohn predicts better exits in the smart grid sector for software and services startups serving the U.S. market, rather than hardware and metering, in the near future.