Apple has bought just under 100 small businesses in the past six years as part of its corporate acquisition strip, CEO Tim Cook told shareholders at a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
According to Bloomberg, Cook said Apple has been buying small businesses at a rate of about one every three to four weeks. Notable acquisitions for Apple just over the past year included VR / AR startups NextVR i Spaces, a weather application called Dark Sky, mobile payment service Mobeewave, And others. Apple has always tried to keep the details of its acquisitions in the dark, but prices of hundreds of millions have been suggested for some companies. According to reports, Apple bought 20-25 companies only during the six months prior to May 2019.
“We’re 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 them drive them forward.”
Antitrust authorities have been subject to scrutiny of acquisitions by massive companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google – in a report by the House Judiciary Committee in October 2020, it was found that the four companies “were, at the time, emerging companies challenging the status quo [but] they have become the kind of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad magnates. ”The Federal Trade Commission demanded details of Apple’s agreements buy other companies last year; however, Apple tends to buy smaller companies that are well below the threshold for regulators to intervene. Most of the allegations of anti-competitive behavior by Apple have focused on the different (if not completely unrelated) issue of its monopoly strangle and iOS and the App Store.
Last year, Cook told CNBC that Apple had avoided antitrust questions about its purchases because its “strategy has been to buy companies where we have challenges and IPs, and turn them into a phone feature” rather than simply taking over the competition.
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At Tuesday’s meeting, Cook also claimed that Apple (which fired up to one Market capitalization of $ 2 trillion in 2020) somehow does not have a dominant position in any market, according to 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,” the CEO said. “This competitive market pushes us all to be better. Thus, although the scrutiny is always fair, accusations like these fall apart after a reasonable examination of the facts.
Other issues addressed during the call were Apple’s environmental impact and new iOS features that reduce certain types of tracking behavior, the latter an object of a ongoing dispute with Facebook. Cook said the company is on track to be carbon neutral by 2030 and expects Apple’s stricter privacy protections to be a “wave in the pond,” according to MacRumors.
For cnbc, shareholders rewarded Cook during the meeting with a vote (advisory and non-binding) to approve more compensation for executives, including a lavish equity package of up to one million shares for Cook, and rejected a proposal to limit the salary of executives in line with that of employees.