Bloomberg: Apple Acquisitions Slow Significantly in FY21/FY22

09 AUGUST 2022 - Less snacking for Apple, it seems. 9 to 5 Mac highlights a Bloomberg report that says Apple’s appetite for acquisitions has slowed a lot in the last couple of years. According to the piece:

Apple spent $1.5B on buying companies in fiscal 2020, falling to just $33M in 2021 and $169M in the first nine months of its 2022 fiscal year …

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says the iPhone and Mac-maker “used to acquire a company every three or four weeks…” He sees the drop off as “a sign the tech giant is being more choosy in the face of a shaky economy and heightened government scrutiny.”

Those seem like plausible explanations. Still, one is reminded of a question from the June-quarter earnings call. During that, Piper Sandler analyst Harsh Kumar pointed out that valuations for a lot of companies have gone down, given the macroeconomic shenanigans and goings-on. The analyst wondered whether that put Apple in a buying mood. Apple CEO Tim Cook indicated that Apple is always in a buying mood, if it finds the right thing to buy. Not to contradict the CEO, but if the company spent $33M for the whole of FY21 and has already spent $169M in the first three-quarters of FY22 - that indicates at least some uptick in interest. Then again, it is a bit short of the one-and-a-half-billion The piece says Apple spent on acquisitions in FY20.

Of course, it’s not like they’ve just been sitting on the money. The company has returned billions to shareholders over the past couple of years. Additionally, 9 to 5 Mac says, “Gurman notes in his report that [his] figures don’t include money spent on content, such as TV shows and sports streaming rights for Apple TV+.”