ABB will launch a process to decide on the 100% spin-off of its robotics division. The intention is for the business to start trading as a separately listed company during Q2 2026. The board believes listing ABB Robotics as a separate company will optimise both companies’ ability to create customer value, grow and attract talent. Both will benefit from a more focused governance and capital allocation.

ABB Robotics says there are limited business and technology synergies between the ABB Robotics business and other ABB divisions, with different demand and market characteristics. The division believes this change will support value creation in both the ABB Group and in the separately listed pure play robotics business. The company will be listed with a strong capital structure, is well invested with a solid cash flow profile and operates through its local-for-local set-up with regional manufacturing hubs in Europe (Sweden), Asia (China) and the Americas (United States).

The ABB Robotics division has approximately 7,000 employees. With 2024 revenues of $2.3bn it represented about 7% of ABB Group revenues and had an Operational EBITA margin of 12.1%.

If shareholders decide in favour of the proposal, the spin-off is planned to be done through a share distribution, whereby ABB Ltd’s shareholders will receive shares in the company to be listed (working name ‘ABB Robotics’) as a dividend in-kind in proportion to their existing shareholding.

As from the first quarter of 2026, the machine automation division, which together with ABB Robotics currently forms the robotics and discrete automation business area, will become a part of the process automation business area, where the customer value creation ability in divisions will benefit from technology synergies for software and control technologies, for example towards hybrid industries.

More information www.abb.com

Hexagon has expanded its collaboration with automotive manufacturer SEAT, building upon a 25-year partnership. The companies have signed a strategic agreement that aims to deepen the digital transformation of SEAT, focusing on the digitalisation of vehicle components, the management of digitised information and advanced process simulation.

The agreement will enable SEAT to optimise its production, making decisions on adjustments to its processes in real time. Hexagon has role has been instrumental, implementing SEAT’s measurement and quality control systems for many years. Now through the extended collaboration, the joint project team will integrate a digital twin that applies metrology data with process simulations to predict outcomes and improve manufacturing efficiency. The solution will make use of innovative systems to digitise the car body and its components, manage their data, and provide reports and analytics that help production personnel drive efficiency and reduce costs.

The collaboration is based on three fundamental pillars: the digitalisation of the manufactured parts of the vehicle, the management of digitised information and the simulation of processes.

SEAT relies on Hexagon’s quality inspection and 3D digitisation solutions, which it has implemented in its inspection and manufacturing processes for body components. Under the new agreement, Hexagon’s PRESTO system will fully automate the high-precision 3D laser scanning of the entire body with high-speed robotic inspection, allowing every detail of the car to be measured and evaluated in real-time.

The second pillar of the agreement is the management of digitised information, which uses Hexagon’s eMMA data management, quality planning and analytics platform, while thirdly, Hexagon’s simulation solutions allow SEAT to optimise production and adjust its production settings using a virtual prototype of the product, speeding up the process of fine-tuning the production methods that will be used in series manufacturing.

More information www.hexagon.com

Flexxbotics has launched the latest release of FlexxCORE, its patent-pending technology at the centre of the Flexxbotics solution. The company says that the new release delivers even more powerful capabilities for advanced robotic machine tending, robotic quality control and robotic production lines by enabling robots – both industrial and collaborative – to run multiple machines with multiple operations for multiple part SKUs. These new FlexxCORE capabilities equip manufacturers to scale robotic production across the smart factory in a standardised way for greater plant capacity, quality and EBITDA margins.

FlexxCORE now includes enhanced robot awareness, parallelised data pipelines and greater data granularity, which further extends the interoperable communication and co-ordination between robots, factory machines and inspection equipment. 

“FlexxCORE’s fully RESTful application programming interface [API] now has an expanded data model to enable dynamic definition of the production robotic environment,” explains Tyler Modelski, co-founder and CTO of Flexxbotics. “This means the robots not only understand each machine’s capabilities, operating characteristics and part processing status, the robots can direct the machines to execute work and know how to correct problems if they occur.”

FlexxCORE delivers compatibility with over 1000 different makes and models of robots, machines, other factory machinery and inspection equipment options, and enables 22x faster connector creation than conventional automation integration methods, reports the company.

Until now, scaling out advanced robotic machine tending across the smart factory has involved endless custom programming and risk. Failed initiatives occur because the robots have limited or no connection to plant equipment and business systems because of interfacing complexity and incompatibilities. With FlexxCORE, for the first time global companies can roll out production robotics across the smart factory in a standardised way for advanced robotic machine tending.

More information www.flexxbotics.com/flexxcore