Apple has bought just over 100 small businesses in the past six years as part of its corporate takeover period, CEO Tim Cook told shareholders at a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
According to Bloomberg, Cook said that Apple bought small companies at a rate of about one every three to four weeks. Notable acquisitions for Apple in the last year alone have included VR / AR startups NextVR and Spaces, a weather application called Dark Sky, mobile payment service Mobeewave, and others. Apple has always tried to keep the details of its purchases in the dark, but prices in the hundreds of millions have been suggested for some of the companies. Looks like Apple bought 20-25 companies only in the six months preceding 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 push them forward.”
The procurement processes of massive companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have come under scrutiny by antitrust regulators – a report by the Chamber’s Judicial Committee in October 2020 found that the four companies “were once startups that challenged the status quo [but] they became the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of the oil barons and the railroad tycoon. “The Federal Trade Commission has asked for details about Apple’s transactions buy other companies last year; however, Apple tends to buy smaller companies that fall well below the threshold for regulators to intervene. Most allegations of anti-competitive behavior by Apple have focused on the different (if not completely unrelated) issue of its issue. monopoly stranglehold on iOS and App Store.
Last year, Cook told CNBC that Apple avoided antitrust questions about its acquisitions because “its strategy was to buy companies where we have challenges and IP and then turn them into a feature of the phone,” rather than take over the competition.
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At Tuesday’s meeting, Cook also claimed that Apple (which went up to a Market capitalization of 2 trillion dollars in 2020) somehow does not have a dominant position on any market, on Bloomberg:
“Apple does not have a dominant position in any market in which we compete, not in any category of products, nor in any category of services, nor in software or applications,” said the CEO. “This competitive market is pushing us all to be better. Therefore, although the examination is always correct, allegations like these fall apart after a reasonable examination of the facts. ”
Other issues addressed during the call included Apple’s impact on the environment and new iOS features that prevent certain types of tracking behavior, the latter being the subject of a continuous struggle with Facebook. Cook said the company is on track to be carbon-neutral by 2030 and hopes that stricter Apple privacy measures will be a “wave in the pond,” according to MacRumors.
For cnbc, the shareholders rewarded Cook during the meeting with a vote (advisory and non-binding) to approve more compensation for executors, including a generous equity package of up to one million shares for Cook and rejected a proposal to limit the executive’s salary to be higher in line with that of employees.