Apple has bought nearly 100 small businesses in the past six years as part of its wave of corporate acquisitions, CEO Tim Cook told shareholders at a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
According to BloombergCook said Apple has been buying small businesses at a rate of about one every three to four weeks. Notable acquisitions for Apple just last year included VR / AR startups NextVR and Spaces, a weather app called Dark Sky, mobile payments service Mobeewave, and others. Apple has always tried to keep the details of its acquisitions in the dark, but prices in the hundreds of millions have been suggested for some of the companies. Apple supposedly bought 20-25 companies only in the six months prior to May 2019.
“We are not afraid to look at acquisitions of any size,” Cook told shareholders, according to MacRumors. “The focus is on small innovative companies that complement our products and help drive them forward.”
The wave of acquisitions by major companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are under the scrutiny of antitrust regulators – a report by the House Judiciary Committee in October 2020 revealed that the four companies “were once underrated beginners who challenged the status quo [but] they have become the kinds of monopolies we saw last in the age of oil barons and railroad tycoons. ”The Federal Trade Commission demanded details about Apple’s business to buy other companies last year; however, Apple tends to buy smaller companies that are well below the threshold for regulators to intervene. Most claims of Apple’s anti-competitive behavior focus on the different (if not entirely unrelated) issue of your Monopoly strangulation on iOS and the App Store.
Last year, Cook told CNBC that Apple avoided antitrust issues about its acquisitions because its “strategy has been to buy companies where we have challenges, and IP, and then make them a feature of the phone”, rather than simply taking over the competition.
G / O Media can receive a commission
At Tuesday’s meeting, Cook also said that Apple (which shot for a $ 2 trillion market capitalization in 2020) somehow does not have a dominant position in any market, by Bloomberg:
“Apple does not have a dominant position in any market in which we compete, nor in any product category, nor in any service category, nor in software or applications,” said the CEO. “This competitive market pushes us all to be better. So while the scrutiny is always fair, accusations like these fall apart after a reasonable examination of the facts. “
Other issues addressed during the call included Apple’s environmental impact and new iOS features that suppress certain types of tracking behavior, the latter of which is the subject of a ongoing feud with Facebook. Cook said the company is on track to be carbon neutral by 2030 and expects Apple’s stricter privacy safeguards to be a “wave in the ocean,” according to MacRumors.
By CNBC, shareholders rewarded Cook during the meeting with (an advisory, non-binding vote) to approve more executive compensation, including a luxurious share package of up to one million shares for Cook, and rejected a proposal to limit executive compensation to more in line with that of employees.