Netanyahu congratulates Mobileye president
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken by telephone with Mobileye President and CEO Ziv Aviram and congratulated him on the largest deal in the history of Israel, which is a source of Israeli pride.
With the car market racing to the winning post in producing driverless cars, the Intel Corporation bought the Israeli company for $15 billion.
Mobileye is an Israeli technology company that develops vision-based advanced driver assistance systems providing warnings for collision prevention and mitigation. The company’s products are used in Australia currently as a warning system on forward potential collisions and for tailgating.
Aviram told Prime Minister Netanyahu that the centre of the company’s operations would remain in Israel, that the company would build a global development centre in the country, and that it would be responsible for Intel’s international activity regarding autonomous vehicles.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said: “The deal dramatically proves that the vision which we are leading is being realised. Israel is becoming a global technology centre not just in cyber but in the automotive sector as well.”
Israel is quickly becoming a global technology power and this is no coincidence. It is a vision that we believe in and are leading with a combination of a free economy and advanced technology. I would like to make it clear that without the minds of the talented people sitting around this table, and I include you Eli, Economy Minister; without this, we would not get far. However, without a free economy, with high and unattractive rates of taxation, we would not get anywhere. With a choking bureaucracy we will not get anywhere. Therefore, we are combining these two things as a matter of policy – advanced technology and a free economy.
Of course, this has found expression today in a very major deal, the largest in the history of Israel, in which a global company like Intel has decided to acquire an Israeli company not just to take it but to expand it, here, and also give it the tools with which to manage the developing field of automotive technology, driverless vehicles, and other things that will be undoubtedly added to it. The fact that this is happening here is great testimony not only to the talent found here, in Israel, but also to the faith in the Israeli economy.
Later Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Economy Minister Eli Cohen met with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Mobileye founders Prof. Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram, at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu said: “We are in the midst of a global revolution. You have already heard me say many times, a revolution of a meeting between great data banks, connectedness and artificial intelligence. This is creating new industries, one of which is familiar to you, the cyber industry. We have invested greatly in this and while Israel is in a good position, we are now in a leading position, with Mobileye, in a field with similar uses, the automotive industry. I believe that there will be other industries. The importance is that Israel is a global centre in this developing field. It, first of all, gives investment in jobs that we are going to receive, in Jerusalem itself, thousands of additional jobs, and this will inject funds into the treasury.
I spoke with the Finance Minister yesterday. We are simply going to advance what we intended to do even before the deal but it will be much easier to do this with the deal. Of course, this is to put a portion of these funds back in the citizens’ pockets in the form of lower taxes and in other ways.
This is good news for growth. Growth is not just a goal in and of itself, it is a means. Thanks to growth, we finance Israeli citizens’ social needs, which the government is seeing to: Health, education and social welfare, all of these with their principal financing, to say nothing of security, the main financing of which comes from growth. And with such major investments, I have no doubt that there will also be additional investments, this will greatly assist growth. With the benefits of growth we will invest in social budgets. If you look at our 2017 budget, its growth in all of these fields is not coincidental. It increased as a result of our growth. We are growing because we are combining a freer economy with high tech.
I would like to congratulate Prof. Shashua and Ziv Aviram. I think that they have shown extraordinary vision here. I told them yesterday: ‘Israel genius and Israeli pride.’ I would like to compliment Intel and its leadership for their good sense. I think that you have made an excellent decision and I think that this will benefit the people of Israel.”
The company’s website states: Mobileye was launched in 1999 with the belief that vision-safety technology will make our roads safer, reduce traffic congestion and save lives. With a cutting edge team of more than 450 engineers, Mobileye has developed a range of software products that is deployed on a proprietary family of computer chips named EyeQ®.
Mobileye is the leading supplier of software that enables Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS), with more than 25 automaker partners including some of the world’s largest. Beyond ADAS, our technology has rapidly evolved to also support the three pillars of Autonomous Driving – Sensing, Mapping, and Driving Policy. As a result of this broad and well-advanced product offering, we have achieved a partnership to develop production-ready Fully Autonomous Vehicles with BMW and Intel, with production launch planned for 2021, and another partnership with the Tier-1 supplier Delphi for a “turnkey” system to be productised starting from 2019 with customer OEMs.
