AAPL acquisitions have fallen dramatically in the past couple of years, according the company’s regulatory filings.
Apple spent $1.5B on buying companies in fiscal 2020, falling to just $33M in 2021 and $169M in the first nine months of its 2022 fiscal year …
Background
Although Apple has enough money to buy up big companies to give itself a head-start in almost any business sector you can name, the iPhone maker doesn’t make a habit of blockbuster purchases.
Apple paid $3B to acquire Beats back in 2014, giving it the foundation of Apple Music as well as a popular audio brand. In 2019, it bought Intel’s smartphone modem business for $1B, in order to accelerate development of its own 5G radio chip – as well as to acquire the necessary patents.
More generally, however, the Cupertino company tends to buy smaller business in order to acquire both their intellectual property and key employees.
Over the past years, Apple has averaged between one and two company acquisitions per month.
AAPL acquisitions falling
Bloomberg examined Apple’s regulatory filings to find that the company’s spend on acquisitions has fallen substantially over the past couple of years.
Apple Inc., which used to acquire a company every three or four weeks, has dramatically slowed its dealmaking in the past two years, a sign the tech giant is being more choosy in the face of a shaky economy and heightened government scrutiny.
The company spent just $33 million on payments connected to acquisitions in its last fiscal year and $169 million in the first nine months of the current year, according to regulatory filings. That’s down from $1.5 billion in fiscal 2020 […]
That deal flow has slowed to a trickle. Apple only made two known acquisitions in 2022: the UK-based startups Credit Kudos and AI Music. The first of those two companies developed technology for calculating credit scores, which will likely aid Apple’s efforts to build its own infrastructure for financial products. The latter business used artificial intelligence to generate tailor-made music.
Apple’s only known takeover in 2021 was the purchase of Primephonic, a classical-music streaming service.
Gurman notes in his report that the figures don’t include money spent on content, such as TV shows and sports streaming rights for Apple TV+.
9to5Mac’s Take
Apple is famously coy about acquisitions, neither announcing nor commenting on most of them. When asked for comment, the company typically responds with a one-sentence boiler-plate reply:
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
There will always be variations in the acquisition spend, but it is fair to say that there has been a notable drop in the past 21 months. This may be random, but Apple will now more be wary of potential antitrust issues, so that may explain why Tim Cook’s Apple Card has been seeing less action.
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