Rick Cohen’s fortune jumped as his warehouse automation firm Symbotic announced record sales and a $23 billion backlog of orders on Monday.
Warehouse automation firm Symbotic soared more than 50% as the firm reported earnings today, making its billionaire majority owner, Rick Cohen, worth an extra $7 billion. Forbes real-time wealth tracker puts the net worth of Cohen and his family at $27.8 billion by day’s end, an astonishing gain that shows the strength of industrial robotics. On last year’s Forbes 400, Cohen ranked number 99, with a net worth of $7.6 billion.
While Cohen, now 70, built his family’s grocery distribution business, C&S Wholesale Grocery, into the eighth largest private company, with $33 billion in revenue, it is the warehouse automation firm that is worth a real fortune. As its stock soared today, Symbotic’s market cap reached $35 billion.
We first profiled Cohen, now 70, in a December 2021 feature, “Meet The Billionaire Robot Overload Reinventing Walmart’s Warehouses.” Cohen built Wilmington, Mass.-based Symbotic largely in stealth to help his own distribution issues with C&S, but by the time it went public in 2022, in a SPAC deal sponsored by venture-capital giant SoftBank, it had signed on Walmart
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Driving up the stock’s rise was Symbotic’s third-quarter results. The company said that its revenue reached $312 million, a 78% increase over the $176 million it posted in the same period last year. It said further that it expects revenue of $290 million to $310 million for its fourth quarter, which would bring Symbotic’s annual revenue above $1 billion for the first time. While it reported a net loss of $39 million for the quarter, as it rolled out automated warehouses, it forecast positive Ebitda–of between zero and $3 million–for the first time in the fourth quarter.
In addition to its own warehouses, last week Symbotic announced that it had established a joint venture with SoftBank Group called GreenBox Systems to roll out its robotic warehouses on a rental model, allowing small- and mid-sized companies access to the technology. Symbotic (which owns 35% of that partnership) said the rollout would begin in 2024, and that it expects to bring in more than $500 million in annual recurring revenue from GreenBox once everything is operational in six years. “GreenBox is the realization of a vision I’ve had for many years to bring AI-enabled automation to companies of all sizes,” Cohen said on today’s conference call with investors.
Symbotic’s chief financial officer Tom Ernst said on the call that the company’s backlog from both Symbotic and GreenBox totaled $23 billion. At the end of the third quarter, the company had 10 fully operational warehouses set up and 33 more in the process of being built.
The scale of Symbotic’s automation is hard to grasp. In a large-scale warehouse, more than 400 of Symbotic’s autonomous bots—or potentially even more than 1,000—could zip up and down ten levels of narrow aisles, completing a few dozen transactions per hour. “It’s a big Rubik’s cube—a big Tetris game is what we call it,” Cohen told Forbes in 2021. “It’s the miniaturization of the warehouse.”
In going public in 2022 when the market had turned town and SPAC deals had fallen out of favor, Cohen was thinking long term. “The market is what the market is,” he told Forbes in 2022. “For me, it wasn’t a one-day stock deal. It’s where we are three, four, five years from now, that’s where the real value will be. We might as well get on with it.”
Based on today’s results, he certainly seems to have bet right.
For more on Symbotic, see our December 2021 profile of Rick Cohen, “Meet The Billionaire Robot Overload Reinventing Walmart’s Warehouses.”
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