In another universe, I wonder if this could have been a partnership?
A company which does multiple acquisitions per year will have a team specialising in the integration of acquired companies, and practice and institutional knowledge of the issues of doing so. But a merger would be different - a smaller company will slot in under some existing executive, with maybe the CEO promoted into the top team if it's a really hot company; a merger would require the merger of two executive teams, which would be a difficult event. So yeah, might not be viable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
That isn't how you can buy VW, the market cap is totally misleading. VW Group has a bizarre structure, it is actually directly controlled by some Porsche Holding company, which is directly owned by the Porsche–Piëch family.
I wasn't really quoting $58B as the price Apple would pay - just an indicator of the size of VW. But probably the wrong one I guess?
I know that a merger doesn't involve paying the market cap. It's more about convincing the shareholders that their final shares in the merged company would be worth more than the sum of whatever shares they have in each part. If it's legally structured as an acquisition, the purchase price is a bit of a fiction.
No, VW Group owns Porsche, the car brand. There is also Porsche SE which is a tiny company, which owns controlling shares over VW Group.
The short squeeze happened because there aren't actually that many shares around which you can buy.
>I know that a merger doesn't involve paying the market cap. It's more about convincing the shareholders that their final shares in the merged company would be worth more than the sum of whatever shares they have in each part.
Shareholders opinions are totally irrelevant. The only thing that would matter is the family who owns Porsche SE agreeing, which isn't going to happen.
Market cap is the product of the number of shares and what the market thinks a single share is worth. So the market cap matters as it puts a bound on what the price could be. But in this case the price at which shareholders would accept such an acquisition is irrelevant, as their is a single shareholder who holds controlling shares and gets to make the decision.
Then sign an IP/licensing deal that both halves of the new company have access to most/all of the IP developed historically.
I.E. securing any future VW profits, and ensuring that the IP licensing deal is indefinite, while staying hands off and allowing VW to keep doing what they do with the exception of using Apple software.
No, apple can not buy VW. This idea is totally absurd.
> In another universe, I wonder [about Apple + VW joining forces]
We're not speculating on what might happen tomorrow, just discussing hypotheticals for the scenario in which those companies were wanting to be partners of some kind.
Basically, shareholders expect you to invest all the cash in your stockpile for a similar percentage return (on average), and they won't want you to invest in a capital heavy but almost profitless industry like carmaking unless you think you can turn it into a business of similar profit levels per unit investment to your existing business.
And what would apple even do with the teams? They now have 10k people in Germany ready to design a car for them, sounds totally nightmarish.
Just to point out, that doesn't mean that you can buy VW for $58B...
Crippled ipadOS, lagging Safari, abysmal window management of macOS, total disaster of XCode, dumb Siri, degrading iTunes and iCloud isn't spotless either.
I don't think that is true at all. They even tried to create a separate company, just to focus on software, so that culture there could develop differently. It just didn't work out.
It's the classic mistake: you setup a separate 'startup style' company to move fast, but give them too much budget and too much rules, so they just spend the budget on rebuilding the same mess instead of innovation. It's a consultant heaven to make a lot of money, but in the end this really only works if the group company stays in the dark for a considerable amount of time and doesn't impose their ideas
This is an attempt to sidestep the politically hairy problem of changing a company’s culture. This never works because the daughter company either gets eaten by the more powerful parent company‘s culture, or their output is ignored and never integrated back into the parent.
These leadership people carry over the whole process and cultural mess into the new place while claiming to be "startup culture". Secondly, one major issue that frequently occurs but goes unnoticed is that, the pay is abysmal.
Basically, the leadership expect to hire talents for the same pay(or sometimes less) of what is paid in core group but forget that core group gets plenty other benefits(union benefits are immense things, educational budgets, pursue some other stuff for a while and then come back anytime to take up where you left off, family benefits, discounts, profit sharing etc.) and get confused when people obviously don't want to work for that kind of pay minus all the benefits.
So eventually, they hire a lot of expensive consultants, who create lot of busywork to induce artificial lack of manpower to hire more of them. Eventually, a lot of budget is spent, only thing left to show are a lot of irrelevant proof of concepts. Then core group finance people comes asking for massive budget cuts, when all of these consultants leave(with any domain knowledge) and suddenly a small firefighter internal people have to start cleaning up the mess and work long hours. Thanks to good social benefits, most people internally get frustrated due to such bad conditions and leave and then eventually the company folds.
Sadly, it is mostly a repeat playbook of big names and I have seen it happen three times already. I don't blame the consultant firms as it is not their fault to make as much billing as possible because they know there will be budget cut anytime. I don't blame internal people leaving because, they are never paid fairly, subjected to very bad conditions and they are free to leave and care about their wellbeing.
I kid you not, one of the failed project had only 1/7th of actual engineers building the software(and partially hardware), 4/7th were mostly leadership and management and rest 2/7th mostly HR, finance, regulation, legal, supply chain etc. And out of that 1/7th, only 10% were inhouse engineers, rest were expensive rented consultants, who were mostly busy doing politics.
The other two were slightly healthy ratio but managed to burn out the hardworking people by not understanding the actual requirements and introducing 200 steps of red-tape on everything.
Are there no auto manufacturers with ok software? Presumably it's not impossible.
The only in house auto software people don't seem to completely hate is Tesla.
I think the chances are slim, considering the general ineptitude regarding software development in German companies. They will get better until finally arriving at mediocre, but they will never be as great as American companies.
I hope one day they manage to implement a functioning CarPlay in their VW Polos, it has been broken since years.