Tesla sells wireless charging business Wiferion

Tesla has sold its wireless charging business after owning it for just a few months. Wiferion is now part of Puls Group from Munich. Why Tesla moved on so quickly is unconfirmed, but reports suggest the purchase was an exercise in "acqui-hiring". Here's what we found.

First to the confirmed deal – both Puls and Wiferion released statements regarding the new ownership.

Power electronic supplier Puls writes: “Wireless charging specialist Wiferion becomes our new business unit Puls Wireless. Wiferion’s customers will benefit from our engineering resources and global presence in production and application support.”

While Tesla has yet to comment and has been left unmentioned by both Puls and Wiferion, US blogs cite The Robot Report, considering Tesla’s acquisition more of an “acqui-hiring” situation. The automaker apparently kept Wiferion’s engineering team on board and only sold its operations and manufacturing business to Puls.

This also makes sense considering the different markets in which Tesla and Wiferion/Puls traditionally move. While Tesla recently teased a wireless home charging station, Wiferion comes from industrial applications such as charging systems for driverless transport systems, robots and forklifts.

In today’s statement, Puls confirmed these shared target markets and said the acquisition would help them offer “future-proof solutions to the manufacturing and intralogistics industries with our FIEPOS (Field Power Supply) and inductive charging systems”.

Bernhard Erdl, Managing Director and owner of Puls, added that Wiferion had “successfully developed inductive charging to maximise the performance of industrial electric vehicles such as autonomous guided vehicles, autonomous mobile robots and forklifts, and thereby gained the leading market position”.

And another statement supports the “acqui-hiring” or poaching argument. Julian Seume, former CSO of Wiferion, who, together with Matthieu Ebert, forms the management team of the Puls Wireless Business Unit, specifically mentioned that “Puls employs more than 100 of the best developers in the industry and has global production and sales locations that take our charging technology and scalability to a new level”.

Seume finds the company “in a much stronger position now” thanks to Puls’ new product development and application support.

With the completion of the acquisition, Wiferion formed the new business unit Puls Wireless, with an operational team in Freiburg, Germany.

The company formerly operated as Tesla Engineering Germany GmbH after Tesla’s Dutch business acquired Wiferion in July 2023. While unconfirmed, reports suggested at the time that Tesla International B.V. could have paid $76 million (around €68.9 mn). The sum was mentioned in the carmaker’s Q2 report under the “business combinations” category.

Tesla, Wiferion and Puls have not disclosed the value of this latest acquisition.

pulspower.com, wiferion.com, therobotreport.com via electrek.co