- General
- February 4, 2019
- 6 minutes read
Amazon Spent $1.65 Billion On 2018 Acquisitions, Filings Show
Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff. Amazon acquired Ring last year in a reported deal valued at more than $1…
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| Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff. Amazon acquired Ring last year in a reported deal valued at more than $1 billion
Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
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Going by a new filing from Amazon with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company spent $1.65 billion on acquisitions in 2018, with drug delivery startup PillPack and home security company Ring making up the lion share of this amount. The filing shows Amazon paid $839 for Ring and $753 million for PillPack, “net of cash”, that is minus the amount on the acquired startup’s balance sheet, which accounts for why the price is lower than previously reported.
Amazon acquired Ring in a reported deal valued at above $1 billion and PillPack for “just under $1 billion“. It also acquired other startups for a total of $57 million, according to the filing. 2018 marked its second largest year of acquisitions, beaten only by its behemoth $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017.
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| PillPack dispensers
image : PillPack
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The company has made 80 acquisitions, according to Crunchbase, including one this year for a reported $250 million. Other notable purchases by Amazon include Middle Eastern e-commerce company Souq, security camera maker Blink, Alexa, Audible, Zappos, Woot, Quidsi, Kiva Systems and Twitch.
Amazon’s high acquisition spend comes amid an increase in M&A (mergers & acquisitions) in the tech industry. In less than two months into 2019, Adobe has acquired french 3D design software provider Allegorithmic, Dropbox has acquired electronic signature startup HelloSign for $230 million in cash and Spotify is reportedly gearing to acquire podcast startup Gimlet Media for over $200 million.
Notable deals for 2018 include Farfetch’s $250 million acquisition of Stadium Goods, Zynga’s $560 million majority acquisition of Small Giant Games, Autodesk’s $875 million acquisition of PlanGrid, SAP’s $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics, IBM’s $34 billion Red Hat purchase, Twilio’s acquisition of SendGrid, Atlassian’s $295 million OpsGenie acquisition, WeWork’s $100 million purchase of software startup Teem and BP’s $170 million acquisition of EV charging network Chargemaster.
