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So, in Apple’s quarterly earnings call, Steve Jobs made repeated references to the “opportunities” out there for a company with $25 billion in cash.
So, what could they buy? This little economic hullabaloo has beaten up a number of companies, so lets look at some market caps:
AMD – $2 billion
NVIDIA – $3.8 billion
Avid – $600 million
Sandisk – $2.1 billion
Sony – $22 billion
Creative – $155 million
Thomson (as in Grass Valley) – $400 million
Bogen – $17 million
Sanyo – $2.8 billion
Autodesk – $5 billion
Now, not all of those are great buys. AMD would be a bit like buying a lead ballon (and not a Mythbusters lead balloon). And some of these would be impossible given anticompetitive issues.
If I had that kind of pocket money though, NVIDIA, Avid, Sandisk, Sanyo and Autodesk would make a pretty nice bundle of acquisitions. $15 billion total, leaving $10 billion in cash still floating around. Nifty!
I’m pretty sure Creative is not worth $155 BILLION.
Woops! Fixed!
Interesting.
They could also afford Adobe easily now.
I think the best purchase here would be Autodesk.
At least for me, the technology knowledge gained would be UNBELIEVABLE.
buying a re-written Flame for $1500 and having it run on your desktop on a very open system, Holy SH#$%^&*
I totally agree – Autodesk is one of those companies that just quietly goes about its business with very little drama. Lots of great IP in them.
I’d have to agree and say Autodesk too.
It would be nice to finally be able to use Autodesk products natively on the Mac and not be limited to Windows.