TECH - Short Seller Does Victory Lap After Amazon Deal Dies — What Happened To iRobot? | Benzinga
Shares of iRobot Corporation (NASDAQ:IRBT) fell over 16% on Monday after the company's highly anticipated 1.7 billion merger deal with Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) fell apart, taking its stock below 52-week lows.
Shares in the company recovered during Monday afternoon, to reach a 7% daily drop at the time of this writing. The company, however, added over 59% in losses during the past month in anticipation of a decision by the European Commission on the deal's viability.
While Amazon is compensating the robot vacuum company with a $94 million termination fee for backing out of the deal, the bad news is causing the company to enter a restructuring phase.
iRobot said it plans to lay off around 350 employees (about 30% of its workforce), while its co-founder Colin Angle resigned as CEO, leaving command to current executive vice president and chief legal officer Glen Weinstein, who will oversee the restructuring as interim CEO.
The high-profile deal, which was first announced in August 2022, raised the attention of the U.K.'s antitrust watchdog in April of last year, yet it wasn't until the European Union's antitrust regulators opened a full investigation into the deal ...