Hitachi to buy rail monitoring business from Balfour Beatty

(Alliance News) - Hitachi Ltd on Monday announced its intention to acquire Omnicom, a digital ...

Alliance News 21 January, 2025 | 2:15AM
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(Alliance News) - Hitachi Ltd on Monday announced its intention to acquire Omnicom, a digital rail monitoring business, from Balfour Beatty PLC to enhance its new rail management platform.

The Tokyo-based conglomerate said the planned acquisition of Omnicom will feed into its new HMAX digital asset management platform for rail ecosystems, marking a key strategic pillar for the company.

The HMAX platform, which was launched in September, integrates live data from trains and rail infrastructure into a single platform that makes use of artificial intelligence.

This data is used to generate guidance on operational and service enhancements ranging from traffic optimisation, maintenance, and energy consumption reduction.

Omnicom will enhance this service through the addition of its software and hardware for surveying, inspecting and monitoring. Its digital monitoring and data analytics capabilities can provide further benefits to customers by processing trillions of bytes of images per day to support track-side maintenance.

"[Omnicom's] monitoring systems can be installed on trains and uses edge computing and machine learning to provide near real-time anomaly detection on rail tracks. The technology can enhance the decision making for maintenance planning and the asset lifecycle," Hitachi explained.

Hitachi Rail Chief Executive Officer Giuseppe Marino commented: "This is a strategic acquisition for Hitachi Rail. Plugging Omnicom's pioneering track monitoring tools into our digital asset management platform, will further strengthen our global offer to optimise customers' rail services and the surrounding infrastructure. New technological solutions such as our HMAX platform demonstrate the power of AI to enhance the performance of our railway infrastructure and systems."

The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed by the company.

On Monday, Hitachi also announced that it had acquired Illinois-based Joliet Electric Motors LLC in an attempt to increase recurring business in North America. Joliet provides sales and maintenance services for large motors across the energy and heavy industry sectors in the region.

Hitachi shares fell 0.7% to JPY3,774.00 each in Tokyo on Tuesday morning.

By Elijah Dale, Alliance News reporter

Comments and questions to newsroom@alliancenews.com

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Securities Mentioned in Article

Security Name Price Change (%) Morningstar
Rating
Balfour Beatty PLC 440.40 GBX -0.27 -
Hitachi Ltd 3,775.00 JPY -0.63 -

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