03 May, 2021
Apple’s quiet Corporate Venturing tactics

Companies such as Google, Facebook, Intel and Amazon expand their capabilities by going for multi-billion-dollar deals. Likewise, Apple has also made this type of deals like the $3 billion deal for headphone maker Beats Music in 2014. But in addition, Apple follows a different strategy in which they acquire smaller firms without a major public profile.

This strategy focuses on getting talented technical staff from smaller companies, often valuing those companies in terms of the number of engineers working there, and quickly and quietly integrating them into teams at Apple. In this way speed expansion in fields where it needs technical talent, or it sees a specific technology that could set it apart from its rivals. In February 2021 Tim Cook told shareholders that the company had bought about 100 companies in the past six years, i.e. buying a company every 3-4 weeks. Services like Apple News+ and Siri are the results of such acquisitions, but Apple is particularly interested in technical staff with experience in the field.

However, the company is generally very secretive about these deals and many are invisible. Apple generally doesn't announce small acquisitions and warns staff at the acquired companies not to update LinkedIn profiles to say they were acquired by Apple.

More details can be found in the CNBC article by Kif Leswing:

https://www-cnbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/01/how-apple-does-ma-small-and-quiet-with-no-bankers.html