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Alarmed by a share slump that's erased more than $630 billion in market value this year and frustrated with delays in rolling out AI features, investors are calling for Apple to break with long-standing traditions to make a big acquisition and more aggressively pursue talent.
'Historically Apple does not do big mergers and acquisitions,' said Citigroup Inc. analyst Atif Malik, noting that the last major deal was its takeover of Beats in 2014. But, he argues, 'investors would turn more positive if Apple could acquire or invest a meaningful stake in an established AI provider.'
Apple shares have fallen 16% this year while traders bid up the shares of peers like Meta Platforms Inc., which is spending lavishly on AI. While Apple faces other problems, including its exposure to tariffs and regulatory issues, disappointment in bringing compelling AI features to its vast ecosystem of devices has become top of mind for investors.
Apple didn't respond to a request for comment.
The company has long shunned acquisitions in favor of building its own products. The largest acquisition in Apple's history was a $3 billion deal for headphone maker Beats more than a decade ago.
There are signs that Apple may be warming up to such a move. Bloomberg News reported last month that executives have held internal talks about making an offer for AI startup Perplexity AI, which would add talent and help Apple develop an AI-based search engine. The startup recently completed an investment round that valued it at $14 billion.
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush who is a long-time Apple bull, called buying Perplexity a 'no brainer,' and said even if Apple paid $30 billion, that sum would be 'a drop in the bucket relative to the monetization opportunity Apple can achieve on AI.'
Since unveiling its AI vision more than a year ago, Apple's roll outs of new features have underwhelmed, such as those unveiled at its Worldwide Developers Conference last month. The company has reportedly considered using AI tech from outside companies, rather than in-house models, to power a new version of its Siri digital assistant.
Kevin Cook, a senior stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research, wants Apple to be more like Meta when it comes to hiring AI experts but stops short of calling for more dramatic changes, saying that concerns about its AI shortfalls are overblown.
'A refocus on AI talent is what's needed,' said Cook. 'Apple certainly has challenges, but this isn't like Google, which could more easily have been usurped by competitors if it fell behind,' he said.
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has spared no expense in pursuing his AI ambitions. The Facebook owner recently lured an engineer that ran Apple's AI models team with a pay package in the hundreds of millions of dollars over a several year period and Apple didn't try to match the offer, Bloomberg News reported last week. That followed Meta's deal to invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI last month.
Of course, Apple has plenty of resources at its disposal to make similar moves. The company had cash and marketable securities of $133 billion at the end of March, nearly twice the cash on Meta's balance sheet.
There have been some notable changes at Apple recently. Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams is retiring after a decade in that role. And Luca Maestri, Apple's longtime chief financial officer, stepped down last year.
Over the weekend Bloomberg News reported that chief executive officer Tim Cook will stay put, though the company is preparing for a broad management shake-up.
Analysts at LightShed Partners say a shake up is 'exactly what Apple needs right now,' even if that means Cook is replaced as CEO. 'Missing on AI could fundamentally alter the company's long-term trajectory and ability to grow at all,' Walter Piecyk and Joe Galone wrote in a note to clients on July 9.
While not calling for a change in leadership at the top, Paul Meeks, senior analyst and managing director at Water Tower Research, agrees that the iPhone maker needs to do 'something bold.'
'A significant deal would not only help them in AI, but show it is committed to a culture change and course correction. It can't do AI on its own,' he said.
Bloomberg's Magnificent 7 index has rallied nearly 40% from an April low. lifted by performances from some of its components like Nvidia Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The equal-weighted gauge of the stocks, which also includes Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Tesla Inc., is inching toward an all time high set in December last year.
Top Tech Stories
Synopsys Inc. has won Chinese approval for a $35 billion buyout of Ansys Inc., clearing a key remaining hurdle for a deal to shore up the US firm's dominance of chip-design software.
Tesla Inc. plans to poll shareholders on whether to invest in xAI, Elon Musk said after the Wall Street Journal reported SpaceX was prepared to funnel $2 billion into the Grok chatbot developer.
LG Electronics Inc. shares advanced in Seoul after a local media report that the company is developing cutting-edge tools for making the memory chips that work alongside AI processors designed by Nvidia Corp. and others.
The departure of Apple's chief operating officer is just the beginning of a broader management overhaul — though Tim Cook is staying put for the foreseeable future.
Amazon.com Inc.'s Prime Day sale helped boost online spending across all retailers in the US by 30.3% to $24.1 billion, according to Adobe Inc., topping its estimate for 28.4% growth for the period ending July 11.
Earnings Due Monday
No major earnings expected
—With assistance from Subrat Patnaik.
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Yahoo
15 minutes ago
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Apple doesn't threaten Visa, Mastercard, judge rules
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18 minutes ago
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It's not just about making the cars faster, either. Power makes heat, and heat needs to be dealt with before it breaks things, on a race car or a road car. Efficiency matters in racing because using less fuel or electricity allows you to go farther between pit stops, and it matters for the same reason on the street. 'Look at Formula E,' Laudenbach said. 'It's not our battery, but we control the thermal system [and] energy management. That's a lot of control systems. That's a lot of software. I mean, if we work with AI in the meantime and there you can learn a lot of the one side and transfer it to the other. Sometimes then you figure out that, okay, I can only take this because this [other technology] is not allowed. It's never carry over one to one. 'But you still learn a lot about how to handle it. It's software functions, it's control systems, it's sometimes also just the tools that we use, the approach that you take is not always [about] the final product. In the end, you have the product, there, no matter if it's software, hardware, but it's also, how do you approach it, because you're always looking for being most efficient. Especially Formula E, [where] we have a cost cap. It's a factor to say, okay, can I reach a certain goal with the smallest amount of money? These kind of things we always exchange because it's in the background.' Cheaper and Easier Not only are software learnings easier to transfer between programs, software is also easier to iterate on and less expensive to develop. 'Compared to hardware,' he said, 'it's not that cost intensive. Yes, you have you have the labor. But you know, you' not always having to change your bits and pieces. And don't forget, if you talk about bits and pieces, you always have to stop and throw parts away. So it's a lot more, let's say, cost efficient.' Whether in the office or trackside, the way data is managed and analyzed has changed a lot in the past decade. 'If we would do it like 10 years ago,' Lauderbach said, 'where the engineer himself goes through all the raw data, that doesn't work anymore. You got to feed your data through automatic analysis. It's just more [a question of], how do you analyze? How do you get something out in order to make the car quicker? This is a lot more or this is high sophisticated, a lot more automation and algorithms, than 10 years ago. 'It's a software basically to calculate what the car's doing because you got sensors. Obviously, you want to calculate some figures, you see what the car's doing in order to feature simulations. The simulation then gives you back again in which direction you have to go.'
