A List of Acquisitions by Tech Giants for the Last 15 Years

With a number of tech giants from the last generation stagnating and dying away in recent times, it’s no wonder that companies today are acquiring smaller companies so as to relevant and more importantly, stay ahead, business-wise.

It’s been almost 15 years since companies that are considered juggernauts namely Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been acquiring smaller firms.

That said, here are a few stats accumulated by business insurance provider Simply Business as to the largest acquisitions made by each of the companies listed:

#1: Apple purchased Anobit and AuthenTec for $390 and $350 million respectively. It’s interesting to note that Apple kept the price of its acquisitions as low as possible since it prefers to buy for technology instead of market share. Quite interestingly, even though Steve Jobs considering acquisitions a failure to innovate, the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, continues to bring new intellectual property to Apple.

#2: Amazon bought Zappos and Kiva Systems for $900 and $775 million.

#3: Google’s acquisitions are gargantuan compared to the previous two. These acquisitions include Motorola Mobility, Nest, DoubleClick and YouTube for $12.5 billion, $3.2 billion, $3.1 billion and $1.65 billion.

#4: When it comes to Yahoo, there was a complete stop of acquisitions for two years until Marissa Mayer went on a buying spree while acquiring Broadcast.com, Overture and Tumblr for $5 billion, $1.83 billion and $1.1 billion respectively.

#5: Last but certainly not the least, Facebook purchased Instagram and Whatsapp for $715 million and $19 billion respectively. The reason why the social media giant started acquisitions after its IPO was to deal with the phenomenon of ‘brain-drain’.