Depth report

　　

Over the years, the iPhone has become Apple’s most profitable product, and this is both good and bad for CEO Tim Cook: he sometimes suffers from continuing to drive the smartphone money-making machine rumbling forward. Praised, and sometimes ridiculed for failing to launch any new products with similar growth trends, this can’t help but ask one question, can Cook speed up this Californian state through one or two high-profile acquisitions. What is the pace of Cupertino's product development?

    RBR analyst Dan Ives (Dan Ives) believes: "Cook’s crystal ball is currently focusing on how to create new areas of technological growth/products for the next decade." In his view, iPhone 7 is likely not It will be everything the company is brewing.

    Some efforts are of course carried out within the company, such as Apple's car project. But Ives believes that for Cook, now is the right time to use part of the company's more than $200 billion in cash flow to make a big deal, and he also listed four potential acquisition targets: Austria Adobe Systems, Box, GoPro and Tesla Motors.

    In the field of consumer products, Apple's strong brand is enviable, but its aura in the enterprise field is much bleak. Apple’s efforts in this area, such as the release of the iPad Pro and its partnership with IBM, can be supplemented by the acquisition of Adobe (a large software player in the creative industry) or Box (a cloud storage platform listed in the first half of this year, The transaction that will be able to expand the influence of Apple's iCloud service in areas outside the consumer market will be able to achieve great synergies.

    As far as Apple's current product line is concerned, GoPro may be the most suitable and natural acquisition target. After GoPro went public last year, there was a lot of glory, but the stock price has now been greatly discounted, and its sports camera products will be very convenient to sell through Apple's retail channels. GoPro can also act as Apple's stepping stone to enter the fields of drones, virtual reality and content-these areas have already aroused great interest from Apple competitors such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.

    Ives also said that a longer-term goal is to acquire Elon Musk's Tesla Motors. Apple does not hide its ambitions to enter the automotive industry, and this ambition has recently expanded, and "the acquisition of Tesla's advanced battery technology will greatly accelerate Apple's entry into the next generation of automobiles." Such acquisitions will not only It can accelerate Apple's research and development process, and will also recruit Musk, a technology dreamer who is widely regarded as comparable to Steve Jobs.

      The list of potential acquisition targets for Apple written by Ives coincides with the current wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and Apple, as always, chose to watch the show. Any acquisition proposed by Ives would be larger than the $3 billion Beats acquisition in 2014-and that was the largest acquisition ever made by Apple, which is contrary to its usual small-scale business or technology. Collateral acquisition strategy. However, even this transaction is still insignificant compared to Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of mobile messaging service WhatsApp.