Körber Machine Vision: Structuring a Market for M&A

Kanav took on the machine vision assessment at Körber with a mandate that went beyond market understanding: the goal was to help the group decide where it could build a stronger strategic position through M&A and potential new market entry.

He started by defining the market structure himself, breaking it into technology segments including 2D and 3D vision, sensing, inspection systems, software, and analytics, and then mapping relevant end markets across industrial automation, logistics, healthcare, life sciences, and electronics. The initial framing was challenged internally: the senior team pushed back on whether treating all of machine vision as one market was meaningful, and asked him to go deeper into subcategories and differentiate more clearly.

That pushback sent him back into the market. He went beyond secondary reports and spoke directly with industry professionals to understand how the market actually worked in practice. What he found changed the analysis: secondary research had made the market look more scalable and software-driven than it was. Professionals told him that demand was still highly application-specific, dependent on system integration, customer testing, and long sales cycles.

Reshaping the Framework

Kanav added implementation intensity, channel dependence, and revenue quality as screening criteria. He became more selective on targets that looked attractive on headline growth but had weak recurring revenue or heavy customization. He triangulated across market reports, company filings, product portfolios, customer use cases, transaction data, and competitor positioning, and separated verified facts from assumptions, using ranges where data was uncertain.

A second pushback came around software-led companies: some described themselves as software businesses, but a large part of their revenue still came from hardware or project-based integration. He reviewed product mix, customer use cases, and recurring revenue more carefully rather than accepting company positioning at face value.

From Market to Targets

With a clearer market structure, Kanav moved into company-level research, screening potential acquisition targets against criteria he developed covering strategic fit, product depth, hardware and software capabilities, geography, financial scale, and end market exposure. He created detailed M&A profiles for each target covering product portfolio, business model, financial profile, geographical presence, and strategic fit with Körber.

The final output was a strategy presentation for the CEO, translating a large body of market and company research into a clear set of strategic options, priority areas, and potential acquisition candidates with supporting rationale.