Apple Becoming More Serious About Corporate Acquisitions?

[Mactagonist]

I would like to know what you think Palm brings to the table. As far as I can tell, Palm has no desirable technology, no mindshare, dwindling marketshare.

As to Netflix, I think Apple can compete with Netflix by building up competitive services in-house.

And as an AAPL stockholder, I'm not keen on Apple acquiring what I see as two over-valued companies. The percentage of shares shorted of float is 31% for Netflix; the market thinks this stock's price is going down.

It's even worse for Palm. The short percentage is a whopping 62%. That's right: more investors think this stock's price is gonna tank than those who think it's going to increase. Palm's financials are ugly as hell (almost $400M of debt?). My guess is if Apple announced that it was going to purchase Palm, the shareholders would not approve the transaction. I certainly wouldn't.

Palm has good software engineers and by buying them Apple prevents someone else from acquiring them. WebOS is a very good OS, it is held back by its crap hardware. If someone with experience designing good hardware like Nokia snapped them up they could become a bigger threat.

The value of Netflix is definitely in their content deals. They could take apple TV from an afterthought to something in every livingroom if it integrated Netflix and iTunes streaming.

 

[Rocketman]

... Apple quietly buys Kodak ...

Let's parse (again).

EK Market cap $1.4B

AAPL Market cap $189.8B

Trivial purchase. Buy, buy, buy.

Rocketman

 

[LoganT]

One of the reasons Apple might want to buy Palm is to get their old engineers back.

 

[theheadguy]

One of the reasons Apple might want to buy Palm is to get their old engineers back.

Is something stopping them from doing that now?

 

[Rocketman]

One of the reasons Apple might want to buy Palm is to get their old engineers back.

Except for one little detail. They don't want to come back or they would have stayed.

Apple should buy undervalued companies with patents and incindentally acquire engineers.

They need to build the new campus and server farm before they go to overboard, unless they want to rent a bunch of space and single-handedly cause a commercial real estate crisis when they move into a new campus. . . . .

Rocketman

We now know where 1 and 2 Infinite Loop are. Where will 3 and 4 be?

 

[spillproof]

Buy now while its all cheap to get the patents, engineers and all that jazz. Apple needs more patents!

 

[paul4339]

- an even larger stake Imagination Technologies to fend off Intel
- a stake in ARM holdings to prevent a competitor from acquiring, and to influence the Cortex design and license costs
- and maybe any LCD technologies companies, _like_ Pixel Qi, that may have some IP strategic to Apple

- strengthen their GIS companies (Placebase) to grow their mapping strategy (I don't know any companies offhand)
- maybe, strengthen their streaming media side (companies like Hulu, Pandora) for more engineers
- don't know what they will do to counter Google-voice, or how it fits into Apple strategy

 

[cvaldes]

Palm has good software engineers and by buying them Apple prevents someone else from acquiring them. WebOS is a very good OS, it is held back by its crap hardware. If someone with experience designing good hardware like Nokia snapped them up they could become a bigger threat.

The value of Netflix is definitely in their content deals. They could take apple TV from an afterthought to something in every livingroom if it integrated Netflix and iTunes streaming.

As others have mentioned, many of the Palm engineers are former Apple employees, so I figure they'd bail if the company was acquired. It would probably be easier/cheaper to get some recruiter to drive over to the Palm campus and stick "Apple's hiring!" ads on windshields rather than to acquire Palm.

My guess is that Apple can strike content deals that will compete with Netflix. The key to that might be iPhone streaming and/or the phantom tablet.

Again, the short percentages for both NFLX and PALM don't persuade me to believe that either company is a sane acquisition target at this moment.

I simply don't see the long-term value proposition; I think Apple can get there with their own internal resources and/or other cheaper methods.

 

[SeattleMoose]

Be Careful of The Company You Keep!!

Goldman Sachs represents the very worst of the east coast financial mafia. I hate to see Apple tarnish its image by having anything to do with such a low life company......

 

[ChrisA]

It's to bad Oracle already got Sun. Sun builds nice servers and has a huge service organization. Apple could have used that to move t the enterprise sized data centers.

 

[cmaier]

It's to bad Oracle already got Sun. Sun builds nice servers and has a huge service organization. Apple could have used that to move t the enterprise sized data centers.

Plus they are utterly incompetent and sucky.

-Cliff, Sun Microsystems engineer, 3 months in 1997

 

[mjtomlin]

Arm

Apple should buy ARM and rename it to Apple RISC Machine.

One other thing... Apple is not in the habit of buying up competitors. Usually they buy up companies to bring something new into the company.

 

[Coroe]

Uh, Apple should simply buy:

- Dropbox

Integrate it into MobileMe's iDisk so that it's finally useable.

- Skype

Integrate it into iChat, so that it isn't a bandwidth hog anymore and useable.

 

[Leopard spotz]

Add features to SL server

Hi,

I would love to see Apple buy a company like '37signals' - they produce a a suite of online CRM solutions that could really add some missing features to SL Server for the SME business environment.

We run an office with 5 iMac's and 2 people out in the field with MBP's and iPhones. At the moment we are using a Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server to tie this all together. Whilst this is great there are features in SL server that we simply do not need (Podcast production) but there are other features that are missing (CRM + Project Management). For this we use online solutions provided by '37signals' but that means we have to pay out $$$ each month, it's not a fortune but it does add up. I would love to see these features/services available on our own mac server.

I think that the small business market has a great deal of untapped potential for Apple, as many of use are willing to pay the slightly higher prices in exchange for an 'all in' solution to our IT needs from a single supplier.

 

[DrEasy]

Buy the elGato guys (of eyeTV fame) and produce an TV offering worth the money. Although for Apple it's probably trivial to recreate eyeTV's functionality with their own engineers.

 

[LethalWolfe]

From the BusinessWeek article:

Historically, Steve Jobs has not been the acquisitive type. Since he returned to Apple (AAPL) as chief executive in 1997, the company has bought only 11 small companies, far fewer than Silicon Valley counterparts such as Cisco Systems (CSCO) or Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Google (GOOG) has bought 11 companies in just the past 18 months.

I'm not sure what criteria BW is using, but Apple has acquired a lot from other companies since Jobs came back. Everything from their multi-touch (FingerTouch) to iTunes (SoundJam) to almost all of their professional applications (Macromedia, Nothing Real, Silicon Color, etc.,) started out someplace other than Apple.


Lethal

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Let's parse (again).

EK Market cap $1.4B

AAPL Market cap $189.8B

Trivial purchase. Buy, buy, buy.

Rocketman

Tens of thousands of employees with pension plans is no trivial acquisition.

 

[capoeirista]

It seems a possibility that EA will be subject to a takeover this year. Why not restart the rumour that apple will buy them? We might get more games.

 

[2499723]

It's to bad Oracle already got Sun. Sun builds nice servers and has a huge service organization. Apple could have used that to move t the enterprise sized data centers.

Kind of ironic to think of Apple having had the opportunity to acquire Sun seeing as that Sun nearly acquired Apple in the 90s. =)

 

[RichardI]

Getting to be quite the giant aren't we, Mr. Jobs? Interesting....

 

[diamond.g]

It seems a possibility that EA will be subject to a takeover this year. Why not restart the rumour that apple will buy them? We might get more games.

I think EA makes more money from consoles than from PCs. Making games for Apples stuff only wouldn't be enough to sustain the investment in EA.

 

[sishaw]

If I were in charge, Palm and Netflix would be next on the list.

Netflix maybe, but why that economic boat anchor named Palm? Sure, they were a great company once upon a time, but that day is gone. Acquiring Palm would not bring any worthwhile technology on board.

 

[KingYaba]

I had a dream last night that Apple bought AMD and all hell broke loose.

 

[cvaldes]

Let's parse (again).

EK Market cap $1.4B

AAPL Market cap $189.8B

Trivial purchase. Buy, buy, buy.

Rocketman

Let's try this again.

Eastman Kodak Financials

EPS: -5.86
Return on Equity: -84%
Total Cash: 1.15B
Total Debt: 1.75B
Book Value Per Share: -2.44
Levered Free Cash Flow: -530M
Short % of Float: 26%
Current share price: $5.02
1 yr. target estimate: $2.81

Short, short, short

AAPL shareholders (most of whom are institusional investors) would never go for this. I'm an AAPL shareholder and I'd certainly vote down an acquisition of Eastman Kodak.

 

[CQd44]

There is nothing that boxee has that Apple cannot do better - if they wanted to.

If Apple wanted to, they could do a lot of things ;]