If you can't beat 'em...
Buy 'em.
Yesterday Sonos announced it was dropping a cool $100 million on acquiring a company called Mayht, a Dutch start-up best known for its prototype speakers that are solar-powered and ultra slim (they're quite cool).
For Sonos, this deal is all about the future. The high-end speaker maker has had a solid run, growing its annual sales at a steady clip of about 14% a year for the last 5 years, a rate that the company says it can maintain, or slightly beat, for this year at least. By acquiring Mayht, it gets access to the innovative tech, which it can plug straight into the stuff it's already good at — like production, marketing and distribution.
On the flip side Mayht has a hundred million reasons to go for this deal, and interestingly never really had ambitions to actually take its own product to market. Instead the founders pursued a strategy to innovate, and then get acquired, almost from day one. Well, mission accomplished.
