Current Walmart technology vendor Symbotic announced last week it was acquiring a Walmart business unit that has been busy developing so-called microfulfillment center capabilities.
Walmart’s Advanced Systems and Robotics business works on technology and processes for fulfilling ecommerce orders from Walmart stores.
Symbotic is acquiring the business for $200 million, according to reports.
The deal is a little unusual, in that Symbotic is currently a major technology supplier for automated distribution centers at Walmart.
After an initial commitment to rolling out the Symbotic technology at a select group of it’s DCs, in May 2022 Walmart announced that after positive results from early deployments that it planned to adopt the technology at all 42 of its US regional DCs for general merchandise.
At the time, Joe Metzger, Executive Vice President of Supply Chain Operations at Walmart US said that “since 2017, we’ve worked closely with Symbotic to optimize the system by testing it in our Brooksville, Florida, distribution center."
Metzger added that the technology system optimally sorted, stored, retrieved and packed freight onto pallets.
What’s more, Walmart has made investments in Symbotic, a publicly traded company, alongside Softbank, the giant the Japanese technology investment company.
Like other microfulfillment systems, the Walmart technology being acquired likely is a dense storage system that operates in a goods-to-person model, designed primarily for backroom retail order picking or focused ecommerce fulfillment centers with tight space constraints.
The technology came to Walmart after it acquired Alert Innovation, a pioneer in automated microfulfillment center solutions, in the fall of 2022.
As a result, Symbotic now has both DC and in-store fulfillment automation solutions.
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 With the deal, Symbotic says it will build a system to automate Walmart’s Accelerated Pickup and Delivery centers (APDs) for in-store ecom fulfillment.
That gives the company quite a bit of market potential. In a press release last week, Symbotic said the deal would increase its robot order backlog by some $5 billion. That as Symbotics announced that if performance criteria are achieved for its system, Walmart is committed to purchasing and deploying the solution for 400 APDs at stores over a multi-year period
For many years, Walmart has touted its 4000+ US retail stores as the way it can beat rival Amazon and its large and sophisticated network of hundreds of fulfillment centers, sortation centers and other logistics facilities.
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