Acquiring foreign firms far away might be hazardous to your share price: evidence from Germany

This paper examines shareholder wealth effects of cross-border acquisitions. In a sample of 155 large acquisitions by German corporations from 1985–2006 international transactions in total do not lead to significant announcement returns. Geography, however, makes a difference: Shareholders of acquiring firms gain 6.5% in cross-border transactions into countries that have a common border with Germany but lose 4.4% in other international transactions. We find proximity to be one of the most important success factors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, even when we control for firm, deal and country characteristics

Detection and Pose Estimation of flat, Texture-less Industry Objects on HoloLens using synthetic Training

Current state-of-the-art 6d pose estimation is too compute intensive to be deployed on edge devices, such as Microsoft HoloLens (2) or Apple iPad, both used for an increasing number of augmented reality applications. The quality of AR is greatly dependent on its capabilities to detect and overlay geometry within the scene. We propose a synthetically trained client-server-based augmented reality application, demonstrating state-of-the-art object pose estimation of metallic and texture-less industry objects on edge devices. Synthetic data enables training without real photographs, i.e. for yet-to-be-manufactured objects. Our qualitative evaluation on an AR-assisted sorting task, and quantitative evaluation on both renderings, as well as real-world data recorded on HoloLens 2, sheds light on its real-world applicability.Comment: Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis 202

The Influence of Frequency Containment Reserve Flexibilization on the Economics of Electric Vehicle Fleet Operation

Simultaneously with the transformation in the energy system, the spot and ancillary service markets for electricity have become increasingly flexible with shorter service periods and lower minimum powers. This flexibility has made the fastest form of frequency regulation - the frequency containment reserve (FCR) - particularly attractive for large-scale battery storage systems (BSSs) and led to a market growth of these systems. However, this growth resulted in high competition and consequently falling FCR prices, making the FCR market increasingly unattractive to large-scale BSSs. In the context of multi-use concepts, this market may be interesting especially for a pool of electric vehicles (EVs), which can generate additional revenue during their idle times. In this paper, multi-year measurement data of 22 commercial EVs are used for the development of a simulation model for marketing FCR. In addition, logbooks of more than 460 vehicles of different economic sectors are evaluated. Based on the simulations, the effects of flexibilization on the marketing of a pool of EVs are analyzed for the example of the German FCR market design, which is valid for many countries in Europe. It is shown that depending on the sector, especially the recently made changes of service periods from one week to one day and from one day to four hours generate the largest increase in available pool power. Further reductions in service periods, on the other hand, offer only a small advantage, as the idle times are often longer than the short service periods. In principle, increasing flexibility overcompensates for falling FCR prices and leads to higher revenues, even if this does not apply across all sectors examined. A pool of 1,000 EVs could theoretically generate revenues of about 5,000 EUR - 8,000 EUR per week on the German FCR market in 2020.Comment: Preprint, 23 pages, 21 figures, 10 table

Development and Evaluation of a Battery Lifetime Extending Charging Algorithm for an Electric Vehicle Fleet

AbstractElectric vehicle (EV) lifetime strongly depends on the intensity of battery degradation. In this study simulation models, which include battery ageing mechanisms were used to benchmark these influences on total depreciation during one charging process. A nonlinear programming algorithm was used to optimize EV charging for a fleet. An energy price signal was included and the total operational costs for EV charging were minimized. It can be shown, that the interior point algorithm evaluates the optimal solution to charge every single vehicle to the necessary capacity for the operation and obeys the load restriction at the charging location. This is shown for a case study incorporating twentytwo EVs for delivery services

Evaluation of the Effects of Smart Charging Strategies and Frequency Restoration Reserves Market Participation of an Electric Vehicle

The emergence of electric vehicles offers the opportunity to decarbonize the transportation and mobility sector. With smart charging strategies and the use of electricity generated from renewable sources, electric vehicle owners can reduce their electricity bill as well as reduce their carbon footprint. We investigated smart charging strategies for electric vehicle charging at household and workplace sites with photovoltaic systems. Furthermore, we investigated the participation of an electric vehicle in the provision of positive automatic frequency restoration reserve (aFRR) in Germany from 30 October 2018 to 31 July 2019. We find that the provision of positive aFRR in Germany returns a positive net return. The positive net return is, however, not sufficient to cover the current investment cost for a necessary control unit. For home charging, we find that self-sufficiency rates of up to 48.1% and an electricity cost reduction of 17.6% for one year can be reached with unidirectional smart charging strategies. With bidirectional strategies, self-sufficiency rates of up to 56.7% for home charging and electricity cost reductions of up to 26.1% are reached. We also find that electric vehicle (EV) owners who can charge at their workplace can reduce their electricity cost further. The impact of smart charging strategies on battery aging is also discussed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version