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Tim Cook Apple Chief Executive Officer
It turns out that Apple has acquired about 100 companies over the past six years. It means that they buy one company every three to four weeks.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said this at the annual shareholders’ meeting on the 23rd local time.
Cook said that most of the deal was aimed at securing technology and talent.
Apple has been actively acquiring information technology (IT) companies for years. In particular, there were many cases of purchasing technology companies that possessed technologies that could be used for their products.
In 2014, Apple bought Beats Electronics, a headphone manufacturer founded by famous hip-hop singer Dr. Dre, for $3.2 billion (about 3.5 trillion won), the largest in Apple history. The active noise canceling (ANC) function obtained through this was installed in the company’s headphones.
The music recognition function of Shazam, which was acquired in 2018 for $400 million (about 443.3 billion won), was combined with Apple Music’s music streaming service.
In addition, the technology of Israel’s’Prime Sense’, a 3D motion recognition sensor developer, was used in the face recognition’Face ID’ embedded in Apple devices.
In 2019, it acquired the autonomous driving startup’Drive.ai’, and previously invested $1 billion in the Chinese vehicle sharing platform’Ddi Chushing’ in 2016.
In addition, Apple has also invested in various back-end technologies, such as servers and databases (DB), that iPhone or MacBook users cannot directly recognize.
At the general meeting that day, Cook reported sales of $111.4 billion (about 1234 trillion won) in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 (October-December 2020). This is the highest quarterly performance ever.
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Enormous financial power
Apple is a company with a market capitalization of 2.1 trillion dollars (about 2300 trillion won) and is the world’s No. 1 super-large dinosaur company. That means that the investment is large.
Apple has used this enormous investment power to buy as many as 100 companies over the past six years, but it seems that each of the acquired companies has been very selective.
For example, when Tesla faced a bankruptcy crisis in 2013, it was reported that CEO Elon Musk offered to sell it to Tim Cook. According to Musk, Tim Cook didn’t even meet him.
In fact, in terms of individual market prices, the value of companies acquired by Apple is quite understated compared to other competitors.
Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion (about KRW 28 trillion), Amazon bought organic grocery store chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion (about KRW 15 trillion), and Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion (about KRW 21 trillion). .
Each of these contracts is greater than the sum of the 10 largest acquisition deals Apple has ever signed.