“Tim Cook is making a habit of breaking with Apple Inc.’s past,” Peter Burrows reports for Bloomberg.
“The chief executive officer is overseeing talks to purchase Beats Electronics LLC, the headphones and music service company founded by music-industry executive Jimmy Iovine and hip-hop artist Dr. Dre, for $3.2 billion, people with knowledge of the matter have said,” Burrows reports. “That goes against the playbook of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who never paid more than a few hundred million dollars for an acquisition, choosing to buy small companies designed to bring in technology and talent. Buying Beats will also signify Cook’s willingness to use Apple’s $150.6 billion in cash more aggressively, according to Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos. in Minneapolis.”
“‘This opens the door to do more mergers and acquisitions, and I think you’ll see more deals around content and products,’ Munster said,” Burrows reports. “Apple’s possible targets include Yelp Inc., payments company Square Inc. and Twitter Inc., Munster said.”
“Until now, Cook has closely followed Jobs’s mergers strategy. The Cupertino, California-based company has bought 24 companies over the past 18 months, mostly small,” Burrows reports. “The biggest-ever acquisition was the $400 million Apple paid in 1997 to buy Next Computer Inc. as part of a deal to bring Jobs back to the company. Since then, the largest known purchase was Anobit Technologies Ltd., a flash-memory drive maker, for about $390 million two years ago.”
Read more in the full article here.
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