Thread by @levelsio (@levelsio)

🇨🇳 You probably already heard this but interesting story in the context of what I was talking about American iRobot filed for bankruptcy and is now owned by the Chinese company that actually produced their products, called Shenzhen PICEA Shenzhen PICEA did something very smart, they bought up a lot of the debt that iRobot had and couldn't pay and through that managed to get full ownership of iRobot when it went bankrupt It's another story of the Chinese manufacturer acquiring their Western brand A similar story happened with Segway in 2015, where the Chinese company that cloned them called Ninebot managed to acquire the original they cloned, Segway I don't know what the strategy here is but I think it's to own the Western brand name iRobot and Roomba which still has a lot of brand awareness worldwide (as the original inventor of the vacuum robot) and gives the Chinese legitimacy