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I'm not convinced. I'm also in the habit of not saying "never" all that often, so I won't do so here.
That caveat out of the way, I feel this is just non-expert observations of superficial similarities. People that follow this stuff need things to speculate about, to get excited or despondent (or, paradoxically, both) over.
Unless I'm missing something, Apple's largest acquisition to date was $3b for Beats. That was a purchase that played directly into their core business market: consumer electronics. It tied directly into their history and consumer strength with music and audio. If the purchase went through and ended up being a bad decision, it posed no meaningful danger to Apple's brand or business.
Disney has none of that. They also have a market cap of ~$160b. Apple would need to pay a large premium to do an acquisition. This would cost them well over $200b, maybe even encroaching on $250b. That's a high single digit percentage of Apple's total value, not quite making it to 10%. The risk and the expense would be enormous for them. Not even touching on the unavoidable legal hurdles that they would have to clear, which adds more expense. And to tie it all together, Disney has no serious integration with Apple's core businesses. Disney is a video, toy, and theme park company, with 50% more employees than Apple.
Not going to say never, but this just doesn't add up as anything that makes any sense.
Yeah this makes no sense for the reasons you stated. One of Apple strengths is their warchest of cash, why would they leverage that on something like this?
Disney feels like a big fucking gamble right now too. The only sentiment I'm hearing about them and streaming services in general right now is pretty negative and they've had to jack their prices up again recently to shore up balance sheets. Also if anything, Apple already suffers from institutional bloat within the organization. I don't see how they could remain focused with Disney now in the mix.
Like you, I'm not saying never, but this seems like one of the dumber big speculations I've heard in a while. I'd believe them buying a major video game studio way before I'd believe this.
Cash isn't always the right asset.
Disney has none of that. They also have a market cap of ~$160b. Apple would need to pay a large premium to do an acquisition. This would cost them well over $200b, maybe even encroaching on $250b.
To preface this, I don’t think this is at all a likely thing to happen but my understanding of the current theories is that Disney would first divest itself of some of its business units prior to a sale of the company. No more ESPN or ABC, for example. The acquisition would still be huge, of course, but not as big as Disney is today, perhaps closer to 5% of Apple’s value.
Wild that 200 billion isn’t even 10% of apple’s value.
I don’t buy that Disney is in trouble at all.
Streaming prices are going up, ads are now a thing unless you pay more, password sharing is on the way out, and soon showing movies in theaters first will taker over, and finally, they’ll begin bundling services you don’t want with the ones you do, and have a minimum subscription term so you can’t just cancel and switch to a different service on a whim. That’s, pretty much their old business model, just cutting out the cable companies.
In the meantime, they’re playing hardball with actors and writers, in hopes of locking them in a long term contract with less money “because streaming isn’t making money”, before much of the above takes hold.
Absolutely wild that more than two decades ago, Disney saved Steve Jobs' litttle tech company called Pixar, which what lead him back to running Apple.
I think it would be worth it just to see DeSantis try to screw with both Disney lawyers and apples lawyers.