While Apple investors are puzzled that the corporation is going to do with their $ 159 billion of available funds, technology giant boldly increases the cost of buying smaller companies. According to analysts from Wells Fargo Securities, in the fourth quarter last year, Apple spent for these purposes in excess of $ 500 million.

In the past year, the corporation behaved much more modest – then her “shopping” cost 284 million dollars. Experts believe that such active buying startups stems from the desire to introduce in their Apple gadgets new technology to maintain their uniqueness. Another reason – to prevent the absorption of these companies its competitors (in particular, Google, which destroys each bought a startup).

Experts also found whereby plucked such a large sum. It turned out that in the period from October to December, Apple acquired only three companies. Among them, the developer of personal assistant Cue ($ 35 million), a manufacturer of 3D-sensors PrimeSence ($ 360 million), as well as social networking service analysts Topsy (200 million dollars).

If you add up all of the above values, we get almost $ 600 million, but analysts say that Apple could actually pay a smaller amount than that which was announced officially. Most of the indicators are indicative because the company almost never disclose the details of their transactions.

Last quarter, the media have also learned about buying mapping companies and startups BroadMap Catch for note taking, but these transactions were completed in the first half of 2013.

Earlier buying Apple frequently testified about new features in its products. AuthenTec takeover in 2012 allowed corporations to develop a fingerprint scanner for iPhone 5s, and deal with Lala in 2008 was the starting push to create iTunes Match .

Experts speculated on why Apple needed those or other startups, but the exact answer to this question we’ll know for sure until next year. Yet, before the release of the first beta version of iOS 8 remains little more than four months.

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