This is interesting. Assa Abloy is a huge international lock company that has acquired many different brands over the years, including Yale and August, as well as doorbird, forte, securitron, whitco, and more than 100 other brands internationally.
Level is a very small company that makes a very expensive Bluetooth deadbolt with all of the smart mechanism included inside the deadbolt, so it makes retrofitting a breeze.
over the last couple years they have continually overpromised and underdelivered on integrations, including promising matter compatibility that hasn’t happened yet. They do have an excellent HomeKit integration and a decent if less reliable Alexa integration.
They also hold a couple of patents on their hardware design, and my guess is that’s what Assa Abloy found most valuable.
It’s possible, if not guaranteed, that this might eventually see the long promised matter integration appear, but we’ll just have to wait on that.
Announcement:
I have one of these locks. It is my least favorite of all the Smart locks that I’ve tried, but I needed the form factor on one specific door, the one that’s combined with my automatic door opener, and this is the one that worked for that. Most of the time.
It’s a little more complicated than that. They owned August for more than 5 years, and then were forced to sell Yale and August operations in the US last year as part of an antitrust agreement with the US department of justice. Apparently, they had just become too dominant in market share in locks.
In September, the DOJ filed a civil antitrust lawsuit to block ASSA ABLOY’s proposed $4.3 billion acquisition, citing the merger would eliminate important head-to-head competition between ASSA ABLOY and Spectrum, risking higher prices, lower quality, reduced innovation and poorer service in the sale of at least two types of residential door hardware.
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In an effort to assuage the DOJ’s concerns, ASSA ABLOY later announced it had initiated a sales process of its Emtek and Yale smart residential business in the U.S. and Canada.
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“With Fortune Brands our excellent U.S. and Canadian residential businesses will get a good and strong home with an experienced owner. While keeping these residential businesses in the U.S. and Canada would have been preferred, we are confident that we have now fully eliminated all competitive concerns alleged by the DOJ and that the acquisition of HHI is in the long-term interest of our shareholders,” says Nico Delvaux, president and CEO of ASSA ABLOY.
The Yale/August package was one of the easiest to sell to someone else. But it doesn’t sound like they wanted to. And they kept Yale and August in other regions, including the UK, which is why they are still listed as Assa Abloy brands. Just not in the US and Canada.
