Wha?
Honda F1 racing team, which had a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars per year was sold at the price of 1 USD a couple years ago when they folded. Anything can happen, in the right circumstances.
I think if Apple is going to buy something big, I would assume they would buy a company with a strong focus in some kind of unexploited “future technologies”. They would not want to buy a toaster manufacturer. They would want something which they believe will grow beyond belief in the coming years. Or which will provide some kind of other support to their business.
Not needfully
I think that apple, due to Foxconns recent decisions to raise prices etc, has realized how important it is to get a more solid control over their most important production lines, especially to get exclusive access to them.
What does the best technology help if your production yield isn’t high enough cause you have to share your lines with your competition?
The iphone 4 is still on several weeks turnaround months after release and the white one yet not even was released
I may be wrong but apple is by far the current biggest technology bubble in the market. Even if shares have a hand to hand relation with “growth prospects”, I do not understand how a company with their revenue (and net income) has so much capitalization within the market.
My guess is apple is really aware on that, and will try to hold secure its position before their own bubble explodes.
Acquisition are a good way to react, yet Apple is not capable of making an IPO over a company that has a revenue (yet negative income) way over 3 times theirs and with such a huge corporate structure compared to theirs too. Making an adquisition on a corporate branch or division within Sony is more plausible thought.
Of course market laws have way more considerations, and who knows what may happen in the future.
Sony’s stock has gone up from these rumors and Apple’s stock has gone down. It seems fairly clear that Sony would sell out if Apple offered the right price, but I don’t see apple offering any price to Sony. It’d be stupid on their part. As for them buying UT or EA, I can imagine them buying Unity and sorta imagine them buying EA.
Rumors are from 30 august then, as Sony stocks trend hasn’t behaved in a extraordinary way in the past few days. Yet a small increase on stock options due to a plausible branch/division buyout would boost shareholder confidence a bit more than what we see right now. Please keep in mind that this is my analysis, not the overall truth.
let’s be real… EA and APPLE? lol lol lol.
Secondly to that, it would be more realistic if it where EA absorbing Apple (since EA is many billions more worth compared to the little apple.)
thirdly, Sony? haha they could eat Apple and EA in one bite. (it’s a HUGE multinational with hundreds of divisions, worth more than EA en Apple both are combined.)
No, you picked up some idiot journalism.
Hardly; EA is tiny compared to Apple. Their market cap is $5 billion, Apple is $250+ billion. (Apparently $280 billion now.) Apple is the second-largest company in the entire world by market cap. Which is far from the only metric, to be sure, but it’s not insignificant either.
Apple is worth 8X what Sony is. You seem to be stuck in 1995; however in reality it’s 2010 and Apple is now a huge company with a stupid amount of cash and a high stock price. You could argue that it’s overvalued (I would, in fact), but you can’t argue with the facts. Feel free to look them up.
–Eric
Nope, They only measured one division of Sony, in the (mentioned) reports. Not the WHOLE Sony imperium.
With aquisitions, parties don’t look at the market cap alone, they also look at the historical value, and the innovative value.
(those cannot be present in hard dollar facts, but only by estimates.)
Also, market cap is just a temporarily figure that changes each year, even quartely in many cases.
EA is a bigger name, than Apple. Thus more worth in the aquisition price.
Sony, i’m sorry for you, i’m not stuck in 1995… i’m in 2011 already… and Sony (all divisions/sub companies/sister companies combined) is far more worth than apple is.
Last known measurement:
Apple market cap: $42.91 Billion
Sony Market cap: $77.20 Billion
gap of more than 30Billion!! dollars, just for the market cap alone.
Yahoo Finance says your wrong http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL&d=t
Apple’s market cap is $281.96 billion
.
That’s a standard game industry trend, not an EA speciifc thing. Apple doesn’t need to buy evil… Steve and Bill have long cornered the market (subjectively speaking of course - I’d hate to offend any politicians out there 
).
EA would be an interesting buy for Apple (and no, the entire games industry doesn’t have enough cash to stand off Apple right now…), So would Disney (Steve did sell out pixar to them, be a might interesting to see him come back around and snap them up). In either case, it would be a clear play for the games market, particularly on their platforms. I’m sure Steve woudn’t hesistate to stick MS with second place release dates on EA titles (course, that kind of stupidity would only open up tremendous opportunity for UBI et al, but… as we’ve seen with Adobe, sometimes Steve gets a bone in his teeth and…)
Interesting to see this one shake out.
Cheers,
Galen
Ummm. Macs come with BootCamp to load Windows onto them. How does that square with this rant?
BTH
Caligary went to hell before MS bought them.
It always had some significant weeknesses, but over time they combined it with not reasonably getting better with new major and .x releases, having their users run away left and right.
GameSpace has shown that rather well … one release and no reasonable support beyond that point (a tool like this requires 2-4 updates per year to remain viable and leads that keep an eye on the field which they totally failed to do), a total deathbirth approach to attack Autodesks outdated max spinoff Gmax or how it was called
MS just had the guts to realize that it sux and that the investments required to get it onto a competitive level is that far out of scale that it would take half a decade at least to make it back into the greens in the light of Maxons C4D, Autodesks tools (3DS Max, Maya, XSI) and Houdini but not at last due to blender.
If MS hadn’t bought it, it likely would have gone through much uglier trouble including being bought by someone who would have voided its existance instead of making it free.
Unity is not remotely in this situation (if an engine maker would be, it would be GarageGames but they lost the battle long ago and were sold out to InstantAction)
Redundancies are a common games industry trend, it has happened to me 3 times. But making annually scheduled redundancies just before financial reporting has only recently spread beyond a few companies.
It may be new to the game industry, but you, my friend, obviously haven’t worked for IBM in the last decade
There are no new ideas out there…
Apple can buy Sony BUT they will NOT, what would Apple do with crap looking devices!
I can see Apple buying Valve or another high end game developer
LOL: “Apple market cap: $42.91 Billion” in what year
LOL - MORE LIKE 277.04B and $51 Billion cash in the bank!!
And if you did some research you would know that Apple is a bigger brand then EA or Sony
Apple #17
Sony # 34
Apple at the moment is the second biggest company in the US and third biggest in the world by market cap (just reality - sorry) after Exxon Mobil, PetroChina then Apple (world).
Financial Times of London 2010 report says Sony:
Ranked 182 Market Value (world) : $38.4bn
No kidding. Everything is temporary and changes quarterly.
Not in any conceivable sense. Apple is #17 in global name recognition, EA isn’t on the list…I don’t know if they’d even be in the top 500; they’re only known to some gamers, not the general public.
http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap
http://ycharts.com/companies/SNE/market_cap
–Eric
Come now people, no need to get nasty. The fact is Apple does have $51BB in the bank, with at least one analyst projecting them to have 90+BB in the bank by 2012. The analysts are speculating that Apple is hunting for some acquisition, based on an off handed comment by Steve, the question is who are they looking at?
Sony is on the list, and not in a good position to prevent a takeover (hostile or not).
Now, Steve does answer to his shareholders too, so I don’t think he’s got free rein to do anything he’d like, so IF they buy something else, it’d have to make sense.
I still think it’ll be interesting to see where they go with this.
Cheers,
Galen
OH, and Unity… .hmmm… well if I were David (and fellow investors), and someone drove a disproportionally large truck of money up to my house (the kind of truck were my great-grandkids will live in a better neighbourhood than I’m allowed to visit today), well… I can’t speak for David and team, but… I don’t know I’d love 150,000 users of the free Unity enough not to think that over closely.