Apple has bought out just under 100 small businesses in the past six years as part of the corporate acquisition, CEO Tim Cook told shareholders during a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
According to Bloomberg, Cook said Apple buys small businesses every three to four weeks. Striking acquisitions for Apple in the last year alone have included VR / AR launches NextVR and Spaces, a weather program called Dark Sky, mobile payment service Mobeewave, and others. Apple has always tried to keep details of its acquisitions in the dark, but prices of hundreds of millions for some of the businesses are suggested. According to reports, Apple said 20-25 companies bought only in the six months before 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 businesses that complement our products and help push them forward.”
The acquisition of massive companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google has been scrutinized by antitrust regulators – a report by the House Judiciary Committee in October 2020 found that the four companies’ were formerly an underdog business that the challenged the status quo. [but] became the kind of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons. The Federal Trade Commission demands details of Apple’s transactions buy other companies last year; However, Apple tends to buy smaller companies that fall far below the threshold for regulators to step in. Most allegations of competitive conduct by Apple have focused on the various (if not entirely unrelated) issue of its monopoly strangulation on iOS and the App Store.
Last year, Cook told CNBC that Apple evaded antitrust questions about its purchases because its “strategy was to buy companies where we have challenges, and IP, and then make it a feature of the phone,” rather than simply take over the competition.
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At the meeting on Tuesday, Cook also claimed that Apple (which soared to a $ 2 billion market capitalization in 2020) somehow has no dominant position in any markets, according to Bloomberg:
“Apple does not have a dominant position in any market in which we compete, not in any product category, not in any service category, and not in software or applications,” the CEO said. “This competitive market pushes us all to be better. Although investigation is always fair, accusations fall apart after a reasonable investigation of the facts. ‘
Other issues addressed during the call include 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 feuds with Facebook. Cook said the company was on track to be carbon neutral by 2030 and that he hoped Apple’s stricter privacy measures would be a ‘wrinkle in the pond’, according to MacRumors.
By CNBC, shareholders rewarded Cook during the meeting with (an advisory and non-binding) vote to approve more remuneration for executives, including a lavish share package of up to one million shares for Cook, and a proposal to remunerate executive management to more in line with that of employees.