A remote village, a world-changing invention and the epic legal fight that followed
The twisted tale of the battle between Norway’s AutoStore and the UK's Ocado
In the village of Nedre Vats, on the edge of a 700m-deep fjord in the west of Norway, there is a white wooden house with a small red barn. This is the home of the Hattelands, village merchants since the 19th century and builders of a warehouse that sits nearby.
It was in the red barn 40 years ago that Jakob Hatteland, the scion of the family, started a television repair business and expanded into selling electrical components. It became the largest parts supplier in Scandinavia and in the mid-1990s grew too big for the warehouse. Then Ingvar Hognaland, Hatteland’s first, most creative, most determined employee, had an idea.
“I remember Ingvar saying, ‘What’s the biggest thing in the warehouse? Air — there’s too much air,” says Synnove Matre, an executive who still works in Nedre Vats for AutoStore, the company that grew out of Hognaland’s idea. She went on maternity leave but, at the Christmas party that year, they talked again. “Late that night in the bar, I said to him, ‘I want to work on your idea, it’s so cool.’”
Others thought it would never work, but Matre was right. Hognaland’s idea was to use robots to operate warehouses stacked as tightly as possible. It turned out to be so powerful that AutoStore went public last October with a market capitalisation of $12bn. The growth of ecommerce and the home delivery of goods meant that, when the pandemic broke out, his invention’s time had come.
Robots at work on a grid system at the AutoStore software development lab in Nedre Vats, Norway. The concept was the brainchild of employee Ingvar Hognaland, who was seeking ways to stack a warehouse as tightly as possible © Helge Skodvin
If your groceries are supplied by Ocado in the UK (or Kroger in Cincinnati and Atlanta, or Casino in Paris, for which Ocado supplies technology), you have experienced his legacy. The retail industry increasingly relies on automated warehouses, and the approach that Hognaland pioneered and that Ocado built on, is even more advanced than Amazon’s. AutoStore systems are being used in more than 40 countries, with 29,000 robots on wheels.
It would be an inspiring story of inventive genius in logistics, except for one problem: Hognaland’s idea turned out to be so valuable that Ocado adapted it without permission. That set off an ongoing global patent battle between the two companies, with billions at stake. When Ocado won one stage of a US legal case in December, its value rose by more than £1bn that day, while AutoStore’s dropped.
On one side is a quiet, determined Scandinavian company that spent a quarter of a century diligently making its robots work, one step at a time. On the other, an aggressive British disrupter that seized on the idea to turn itself into a juggernaut. And beneath it all, a classic question: does a revolutionary innovation belong to the person who had the idea, or should it belong to the world?