Apple acquisitions: Tech giant buys a company every three to four weeks
As the giants of Silicon Valley jostle for pole position in the escalating technology arms race, mergers and acquisitions are often the name of the game.
But the scale of Big Tech acquisitiveness has been laid bare after Apple boss Tim Cook revealed his company has snapped up roughly 100 companies over the last six years.
That equates to roughly one acquisition every three to four weeks, Cook told a meeting of shareholders last night.
Apple, which at $2.1 trillion has the largest market capitalisation of any US company, has had a bumper year of trading as demand for its products and services soared during the pandemic.
Last month the iPhone maker reported record quarterly revenue of $111.4bn, putting it in an exclusive group of companies to earn more than $100bn in a single three-month period.
Cook said the company’s acquisition strategy was aimed at strengthening its offering both in terms of technology and talent, Bloomberg reported.
Apple’s biggest bites
Apple’s largest acquisition of recent years was its $3bn takeover of Beats, the headphone maker and streaming service founded by rapper and producer Dr Dre, in 2014.
Other major deals include its $400m takeover of music recognition app Shazam and a $600m licensing deal with British chipmaker Dialog Semiconductor.
It has also inked a range of deals to take over smaller firms specialising in a range of tech innovations, which it then builds into its own products.
This includes autonomous vehicle startup Drive.ai, payments software firm Mobeewa and virtual reality platform NextVR.
Despite the long list of acquisitions, though, Apple appears to be selective about its deals.
Elon Musk recently revealed that he had approached Cook about a takeover of Tesla, but the tech boss refused to take the meeting.
Apple has also proved less willing to splash out on big-ticket acquisitions than some of its tech rivals.
Salesforce recently agreed to buy business messaging platform Slack for $27.7bn, while Microsoft paid $26bn for Linkedin and Facebook forked out $19bn for Whatsapp.