Jan 5 (Reuters) – Mobileye (MBLY) said on Monday it had secured a major U.S. automaker as a customer for its next-generation chips, boosting production prospects for its self-driving technology already standard in millions of vehicles.
Mobileye shares rose 7% before the market opened on Monday.
The deal will see an unnamed top 10 U.S. automaker integrate Mobileye’s systems into mass-market and premium models.
The company’s shares have nearly halved in the last year, but were up 6.4% in premarket trading.
The rollout of advanced driver assistance systems is accelerating due to competition between U.S. and European automakers, with hands-free highway driving growing rapidly.
Mobileye is increasingly emphasizing advanced driver assistance systems as a near-term growth driver amid a slower-than-expected commercial rollout of fully autonomous vehicles.
The agreement expands Mobileye’s production prospects and is expected to deliver more than 19 million units of EyeQ6H-based Surround ADAS systems in the future, with approximately 9 million units related to newly announced automakers as well as existing projects announced by the Volkswagen Group in March.
Surround ADAS enables hands-free, eye-catching driving on selected highways and is designed to consolidate multiple driving and safety functions onto a single chip and electronic control unit, thereby reducing costs for automakers looking to simplify increasingly complex vehicle electronics.
Mobileye says the system combines multiple cameras, radar and crowdsourced road mapping data to support features such as automatic lane changing, traffic jam assistance and highway cut-in protection, while also supporting over-the-air software updates.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
