“Apple buys a company every two to three weeks on average, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC’s Becky Quick in an interview from Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting over the weekend,” Lauren Feiner reports for CNBC. “In roughly the last six months alone, Cook said Apple has bought approximately 20 to 25 companies. Apple often doesn’t announce these deals because the companies are small and Apple is ‘primarily looking for talent and intellectual property,’ Cook said.”
“In its fiscal second-quarter earnings report, Apple reported a $225.4 billion cash hoard, making it one of the most cash rich companies in the world,” Feiner reports. “Apple has pledged to contribute $350 billion to the U.S. over five years, through expansion and taxes on repatriated cash.”
“Even though Apple acquires several companies a year, it’s famous for not making major acquisitions,” Feiner reports. “Apple has also reportedly mulled other major acquisitions, including Time Warner in 2016, according to a Wall Street Journal report at the time”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We continue to hear whispers that a “very big” Apple acquisition looms.
As we reported on April 4, 2019:
A little birdie tells us that “a major Apple acquisition looms,” but that “it’s not yet a done deal.” If it goes through, however, “people will be shocked.” No further information was given. We’re unsure if “people will be shocked” at the name of company Apple may acquire, the size of the acquisition, both, and/or something else altogether.
Apple reports Q219 earnings on Tuesday, April 30, 2019 after market close, right around 4:30pm EDT. Traditionally, Apple updates investors on the company’s capital return program – buybacks and dividends – at that time.
Apple plans “to become approximately net cash neutral over time,” in the words of CFO Luca Maestri in February 2018. Apple currently has north of $245 billion cash on hand. In other words, the sky’s the limit!
Stay tuned.
SEE ALSO:
Major Apple acquisition looms; ‘people will be shocked’ – April 4, 2019
One of their acquisitions should have been Eero, whose mesh network products would have been a perfect fit for Apple, IMO
Maybe Apple knew something about eero that you didn’t…
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18297619/amazon-Eero-price-fire-sale-mesh-wi-fi-buyout
I find it maddening that Apple abandoned its customers right at the most crucial point: the interface with the internet. This is the part that most users don’t understand, don’t have adequately secured and whose knowledge is limited to unplugging it and restarting and they often do that wrong if there are multiple or perhaps any hard wired devices such as routers, desk tops, scanners and printers connected.
I assume it wasn’t profitable and created a ton of support calls that Apple had to support because it was Apple routers. I suppose they will soon no longer offer support for network related problems and turf those calls to the router and modem manufacturers. We all know how that will turn out for the customer.
Also, and lastly, trying to determine if a problem is due to the network or the device, is often not easy, even for me and even when proceeding logically down the troubleshooting pathways. These and sync problems are the things I’m always asked to fix. Most of the time, the problems are varied and inconsistent and near impossible to reproduce. Usually, I’m not sure what I did that fixed it and it often seems to have taken multiple fixes to actually call it done. I do believe that the network is almost always entangled with the mess, but never sure what caused what. With multi branded networks that will be our futures, the troubleshooting and security just grew in complexity considerably.
So what if you don’t support your customer’s who will? Bestbuy? Amazon?
This is what happens when a company can no longer innovate.