Apple has bought out nearly 100 small businesses in the past six years as part of the corporate acquisition, CEO Tim Cook told shareholders at a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
According to BloombergCook said that Apple buys small businesses at a rate roughly every three to four weeks. In the past year alone, there were notable acquisitions for Apple, including VR / AR startups NextVR and Spaces, a weather app 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 in the hundreds of millions have been suggested for some companies. Apple reportedly bought 20-25 companies in the six months leading up to May 2019 alone.
“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 move them forward.”
Acquisitions by big companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have been scrutinized by antitrust regulators – an October 2020 House Judiciary Committee report found that the four companies were “ once underdog startups challenging the status quo. [but] 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 deals buy other companies last year; However, Apple tends to buy smaller companies that are well below the threshold for regulators to intervene. Most allegations of anti-competitive behavior by Apple focused on the other (if not entirely unrelated) issue of its Monopoly stranglehold on iOS and the App Store
Last year, Cook told CNBC that Apple had dodged antitrust questions about its buyouts because its “strategy was 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.
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At Tuesday’s rally, Cook also claimed that Apple (who went to a Market cap 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 a market in which we compete, not in a product category, not in a service category, or in software or apps,” said the CEO. “This competitive market forces us all to get better. So while auditing is always fair, allegations like this fall apart after a reasonable examination of the facts. “
Other issues raised during the call included Apple’s impact on the environment and new iOS features that address certain types of tracking behavior, the latest of which is the subject of an ongoing feud with FacebookCook said the company is on track to be carbon neutral by 2030 and that he hoped Apple’s tighter privacy safeguards would be a “ripple in the pond,” MacRumors said.
Per CNBCShareholders rewarded Cook with (an advisory and non-binding) vote at the meeting to approve more executive compensation, including a generous stock of up to one million shares for Cook, and shot down a proposal to limit executive compensation to more in line with that of employees.