Clever marketing to have Jeffrey Wright (Bernard Lowe in HBO's West World) talking about tech that monitors cows. If you're familiar with the show, you'll know what I mean...
The Chitale Dairy operation is certainly impressive and a great place to feature IOT for the dairy industry (the largest dairy in the largest milk producing country in the world)... and there's some great video and info about this initiative online. However, the competition for Sensera in all this is not immediately apparent.
VMware and Dell's 'cows to cloud' partnership with Chitale poses no direct threat to Sensera, but it does provide the backdrop for the emergent competition between two major global animal health providers, Allflex (now Antelliq) and Zoetis... and that is of great significance to Sensera, and its Nanotron subsidiary.
The Chitale Dairy initiative uses Allflex NFID tags to monitor its cows.
Ten days ago Allflex bought Agrident, 'a leading provider of RFID technology for the electronic animal identification market' based in Germany. Sound familiar? In August 2017, Sensera bought Nanotron, an IOT leader in location-awareness tracking and animal health monitoring. In October 2017, Sensera announced a multi-year contract with Smartbow to supply their NanoLOC location chips (and associated anchor devices and middleware) for Smartbow's Eartag LIFE product... and Smartbow is a subsidiary of Zoetis.
It looks like Antelliq (Allflex) and Zoetis are positioning themselves to go head to head in the animal health IOT space. While Allflex's Near Field ID (NFID) tags provide information on animal health, they don't provide tracking and locational information. Antelliq may have plans to add this functionality in the near future, as signalled by their takeover of Agrident.
Sensera stands to benefit significantly from its contractual arrangements with Smartbow as Zoetis seeks to establish itself in the animal health IOT space and goes head-to-head with Antelliq/Allflex (and other major players in the industry). We already know that Sensera expects sales to Smartbow to accelerate from 100s to 1000s of farms in FY19, so Zoetis plan to move aggressively into this market. Antelliq is a private company. It would have to be extremely well resourced to compete with Zoetis, with its market cap of over US$35Bn and extensive global sales and distribution networks.
I'm not worried... and have already taken up my entitlement. All IMO. GLTAH R-7
