Investors and analysts have long dreamed of Apple buying Disney as such a deal would likely turn Apple into a media superpower and generate synergies across its entire ecosystem.
When Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, he owned more shares of Disney than he did of Apple. He had gained that stake through his sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006. Since then, many people have dreamed of a merger between the two iconic American companies.
Disney CEO Bob Iger floated that idea in his 2019 memoir and even claimed in a 2021 interview that Jobs would have supported a merger if he had lived. Last November, an unnamed insider claimed Iger could sell Disney to Apple, but Iger denied those rumors. Needham analyst Laura Martin recently revived that idea in a research paper that claimed an acquisition of Disney could easily boost Apple’s valuation by 15% to 25%.
Apple could buy Disney for three reasons: It would expand its services segment, reduce its dependence on the iPhone, and potentially generate synergies in terms of marketing, bundling strategies, and the collection of customer data.
Those possibilities are tantalizing, but the acquisition would be a bad idea for three reasons: the hefty price tag, the acquisition indigestion, and the mismatched operating margins.
MacDailyNews Take: Tim Cook has shown no appetite for mega acquisitions. Disney’s price tag would be at least $200 billion. Apple’s largest acquisition ever occurred in 2014, when the company acquired Beats Electronics for a mere $3 billion, a relatively paltry drop in the bucket (in Apple’s last-reported quarter, the company posted revenue of $117.2 billion. Apple’s revenue for calendar 2022 was $387.537 billion).
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MDN take is spot on. Not only Cook has no stomach to manage large acquisitions, or manage high level executives resigning at a record rate, or managing long-term large projects like Project Apple Titan(ic).
Needless to say, more reasons to REPLACE Cook who only manages profits well, NOT people or products…
Disney is not the same Disney as when SJ was alive.
Back in the dark days for Apple, many pundits were saying Disney should buy Apple!
Sony should by Apple!!
(Sony who?)
Disney is not the same Disney as when SJ was alive… now Disney is full of SJWs
It’s a toxic woke s—-show. All their programs are woke crap. Retroactively, Luke skywaler is now gay. I cancelled Disney + and refuse to buy anything from Disney. I hope everyone there gets fire or the company burns to the ground. An evil grooming toxic company with no remaining value.
no!
Why would Apple want to deal with people with problem between their ears who try to fix it by messing with things between their legs!
The one doesn’t “need” the other, no matter which side you stand on.
Well said. Apple can become Disney while Disney crumbles and stumbles worry about what people want on their bumbles.
I prefer the title to this article to be “Why Would Apple Want to buy Disney”
I would prefer the title “Why Would Apple want to Buy Disney?”
Hasn’t Disney+ been losing money? Wouldn’t the whole point of Apple buying Disney be to make $$$ off streaming their past and future content library?
No — Disney is NOT losing money. They made roughly $1.7 billion (before taxes) in the quarter that ended on 12-31-22. True, Disney+ lost a bit more than a billion dollars, which isn’t nothing, but considering they are financing a ton of new programming and marketing to build their subscriber base, the loss isn’t unexpected (Amazon lost money for its first six years, and it took another decade before it started turning serious profits).
Apple doesn’t need Disney, and Disney doesn’t need Apple. Moreover, there’s just no real business case for a deal like this. Which is not to say it couldn’t happen. A $200 billion merger makes a LOT of people VERY rich (just not the average stockholder). Would investment bankers promote a deal in which they would profit to the tune of billions of dollars? Uh, yeah.
Well, I would want to buy Disney to purge the wokeness