Apple and its Non-Acquisitions

Over at Technologizer, Harry McCracken has an excellent rundown on the long history of rumored acquisitions by Apple that never came to pass. Some of these hypothetical deals made at least superficial sense, most didn’t.

Here’s one test to apply to any talk of an Apple deal: Margin dilution. When financial analysts talk of dilution, they are referring to how the costs of an acquisition will reduce the equity of existing shareholders. Apple’s enormous market cap means that is rarely going to be a huge problem, but a company like Apple is going to be very wary of any acquisition that would seriously erode its very healthy profit margins.

That’s one overwhelming reason why Apple would be very unlikely to give more than about 10 second’s’ consideration to the rumored purchase of  Barnes & Noble. On the roughest sort of pro forma calculation, an Apple-Barnes & Noble merger would have reduced Apple’s profit margin in the most recent fiscal year from 23.5% to 21.9%. At most companies, a point and a half of margin is something to kill for. Since B&N offers no technology that Apple wants (strategic investments can be viewed through a different lens than purely financial ones) and  would saddle Apple with a great deal of real estate that it has no use for, the deal makes no sense on any level.

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Steve Wildstrom

Steve Wildstrom is veteran technology reporter, writer, and analyst based in the Washington, D.C. area. He created and wrote BusinessWeek’s Technology & You column for 15 years. Since leaving BusinessWeek in the fall of 2009, he has written his own blog, Wildstrom on Tech and has contributed to corporate blogs, including those of Cisco and AMD and also consults for major technology companies.

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