In an interview to the television news channel CNBC from Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting over the weekend, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has said that on the average, the company acquires one company at a difference of every two to three weeks.

A total of about 20 to 25 companies had been purchased by Apple in roughly the last six months alone, Cook said in the interview. Cook said that most of these companies are too small in size to make an announcement and therefore the company does not make any formal disclosure at the time of purchasing them. He also said that Apple is “primarily looking for talent and intellectual property.”

The massive purchasing power of the iPhone maker is however revealed by this aggressive acquisition strategy. A total of a $225.4 billion in cash at hand was reported by Apple in its fiscal second-quarter earnings report. That put it among the top few in the list of the most cash rich companies in the world. A contribution totalling $350 billion in the U.S. over five years has been promised by Apple through business acquisitions, other expansion strategies and payment of taxes on cash that brought into the country which had been stored abroad because  of high levels of US corporate taxes.

The company is now focused on and is spending to other goals after it invested in initiatives like its new $1 billion campus in Austin, Cook said.

”[I]f we have money left over, we look to see what else we [can] do,” Cook said. “We acquire everything that we need that can fit and has a strategic purpose to it. And so we acquire a company on average, every two to three weeks.”

Some of the more high-profile acquisitions that have been made more recently by Apple reflect that strategy. For example, an indicator that the company is going to venture into news service through its new Apple News+ service that offers access to a variety of publications for a flat fee was available from its acquisition of digital magazine subscription service Texture in 2018.

Despite making large number of acquisitions throughout the year, Apple is also known for4 not making any large or major acquisitions. The acquisition of Beats in 2014 in a deal worth $3 billion was the largest for the company in recent times. Beats was transformed into the Apple Music streaming service and the acquired company still sells Beats headphones as part of its growing wearables category.

There have however been reports of Apple planning on making some other major acquisitions such as purchasing Time Warner in 2016 which was reported in the Wall Street Journal at the time. Some investors and analysts have been pushing for Apple to make major acquisitions with the huge stock pile of cash it possess – acquiring companies such as Tesla or Netlfix for example.

(Adapted from CNBC.com)