At the last shareholders meeting, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, announced a series of data related to both the past and the present and future of the company. Cook announced that in the past six years, the company he runs had bought more than 100 companies, which is the equivalent of buying one every three to four weeks.
In most cases, the reason for the purchase is focused on acquire patents, technology and talent that the company has been able to create, companies that in most cases end up finally lowering the blind as workers become part of Apple teams around the world.
La largest purchase Apple has made in recent years, is still owned by Beats Electronics, a company that bought in 2014 for 3.000 billion dollars, a company founded by Dr. Dre and had a streaming music service, a service that was the forerunner of Apple Music, a music service in streaming that was launched a year after the purchase of Beats.
The second purchase that represented a significant effort for Apple was that of Shazam for 400 million in 2018, a purchase that did not see the approval of the European Union (it was a British company) until the end of 2019.
In the past year, Apple has focused on business acquisitions related to Artificial Intelligence and podcast platforms, two categories Apple seems to be focusing its efforts on lately.
The average value of the companies that Apple has acquired in recent years is much lower than the companies that have bought Microsoft (paid 26.000 million for LinkedIn), Amazon (13.700 million for Whole Food) and Facebook (19.000 million for WhatsApp).
