The Evolution of Tech Companies: A Look at HP, Microsoft, and Vodafone's Mergers and Acquisitions

In 2021, I had the opportunity to use one of HP's earlier fitness trackers, which was a rudimentary device. It's amazing how far tech companies have come since then. One of my earliest memories of tech companies is HP buying Compact Presario, which started to look like HP computers at the time. I must have been in first or second grade when this happened, and it piqued my interest in tech companies.

As I grew older, I began to notice that HP was involved in various mergers and acquisitions. The acquisition of Compact Presario is just one example of how HP expanded its reach in the market. It's also worth noting that HP is now a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The merger between HPE and Hewlett-Packard in 2015 marked a significant shift in the company's strategy.

Another tech giant, Microsoft, has made several significant acquisitions in recent years. One notable example is its purchase of Zenimax's gaming division, which includes Bethesda Softworks and Arcane Studios. This deal, valued at around $7.5 billion, has been met with excitement from gamers and investors alike. However, it's worth noting that the acquisition is currently under challenge by regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission.

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is another significant move in its quest to expand its gaming portfolio. The deal, valued at around $60 billion, includes popular franchises like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. While some have raised concerns about Sony's potential opposition to the deal, Microsoft argues that it will benefit from having a diverse range of games across various platforms.

In contrast, Vodafone has made significant acquisitions in its history. One notable example is its purchase of Mannesmann AG in 2000, which was valued at around $183 billion. This deal marked one of the largest mergers in history and gave Vodafone control over a significant portion of Europe's telecommunications market. At the time, it was estimated that this acquisition would be worth around $297 billion in today's dollars.

The sheer scale of these acquisitions is staggering. For comparison, Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is equivalent to around 0.08% of Vodafone's purchase price for Mannesmann AG. To put it into perspective, if we assume a GDP of $25 trillion for the United States at the time of this acquisition, it would be worth around $60 billion in today's dollars.

In contrast, Vodafone's acquisition of Mannesmann AG is more like 37% of that amount. This highlights just how massive these deals are and the impact they have on the global market. The sheer scale of these acquisitions also raises questions about the role of regulators in overseeing such deals. With some mergers being worth tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars, it's clear that these deals can have a significant impact on the economy.

In addition to its purchase of Mannesmann AG, Vodafone has made other significant acquisitions over the years. One notable example is its acquisition of NMT in 2001, which was valued at around $26 billion. This deal marked Vodafone's entry into the US market and gave it a significant foothold in the global telecommunications industry.

While some have raised concerns about the impact of these mergers on competition, others argue that they will drive innovation and improve services for consumers. Regardless, it's clear that tech companies are always looking to expand their reach through strategic acquisitions. As we move forward into an increasingly interconnected world, it will be interesting to see how regulators and policymakers respond to these deals.

In the meantime, fans of Call of Duty can rest assured that Microsoft is committed to supporting its popular franchise across various platforms. While some have raised concerns about Sony's potential opposition to this deal, it's clear that Microsoft is willing to take risks in pursuit of growth.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday on the channel we're trying something different we're going to line up some of the biggest Tech Acquisitions ever made I even have a little magnetic thing here this is wait wrong channel oh Microsoft purchasing Nokia's mobile division so these two companies have a pretty decorated past I mean now we have products like the surface Duo which you know exists for better and for worse but I think some of the best hardware that's come out of Microsoft really was with that Nokia partnership who they acquired back in when was it 2014 2014 got some excellent colors the UI on Windows phone was some of the best and it was absolutely smooth unfortunately IOS and Android were way too popular for that to take off but there's still a part of me that would love to go back to those Glory Days where all three were competing in pure Harmony how much do you think Microsoft spent buying the mobile division of note I think Nokio needed a little bit of saving after not jumping on to the smartphone train early enough I'll say five billion dollars close 7.2 billion dollars I'll tell you every single one of these is with a B I'll put this healthy low like there hopefully my sense of scale works for this T-Mobile purchasing Sprint so if we're looking at us telecoms for those of you outside of this country there were four big cellular carriers Verizon's up top then a t then T-Mobile and then Sprint or was it the other way around all that matters is that the two smallest carriers wanted to merge to take on the two bigger ones and it was definitely met with some scrutiny I can tell you as a lifelong T-Mobile customer my parents have been with them and I'm on their family plan I've been with them for the past 15 years actually no it might even be more than that when did The Voice stream thing happen some of you probably weren't even born yet new Fair T-Mobile did purchase Sprint it was not an actual merger it was an acquisition although both companies started sharing assets especially you know cellular Spectrum you kind of need it when Verizon has service literally everywhere and even the same for at T T-Mobile really wanted to play ball but how much was that really worth telecoms will around 25 billion dollars 26. I'm really good at this boy we have quite the sliding scale here I think it's gonna go like boom well I even have room for everything on this list I guess we gotta find out Intel purchasing mobile eye mobile eye so this list probably has a lot of Acquisitions of big companies that I probably don't even know what they do okay are you gonna tell me what they do I can tell you what they do okay so mobile was founded in 1999 although it was only until 2008 that they've created their first Hardware but they are in the automotive space specifically with an eye towards self-driving and assistant driving tools so they actually used to have a partnership with Tesla although that kind of went away because an autopilot car crashed and they didn't want to be responsible what a Tesla crashing no way mobile tech is found in a ton of current cars including the Mustang Mach e F-150 BMW IX as well as the Nissan Aria with many many more and they were purchased by Intel in 2017. for no reason other than I just have no idea what the value of this company is I'm just gonna say billion dollars 15 billion dollars some of you'll be like 10. stop scripting this 15 billion 15 billion dollars Apple purchasing beats beats has had a bit of an Infamous past very popular headphones but extremely overhyped while the brand is certainly not in the public eye as much as it used to be the hive might have you know fizzled out a little bit it's certainly cool that beats have Apple's Hardware in it to work with iPhones better than most other third parties will actually no I guess that makes them first party now doesn't it this is Apple's largest acquisition in their history and it was taken place in 2014. beats was a very valuable company I mean you saw a lot of athletes wearing their stuff Billboards everywhere they were kind of a fashion statement so makes a lot of sense that Apple would want them in their portfolio 35 billion dollars you were almost exactly correct three billion we're going back to Microsoft a little bit of an older School acquisition when they purchased Skype that's something I haven't heard in a while everyone and their grandmothers used it to talk over the Internet fun fact at one point Skype comprised 40 of all international phone calls 40 that's how I talk to all of my friends a lot of the people that I know are actually spread out across numerous countries we didn't have WhatsApp at least it wasn't as popular as it is now and same thing with Discord there's a lot of people that love to use these things to talk to basically anyone and anywhere back then Skype really was the best option I guess you can also argue that Microsoft also killed Skype I mean you should say something that we use teams and not Skype these days I'm sure there's a lot of tech on the back end that's borrowed from Skype to put into teams because they own the IP I'm gonna say two billion dollars 6.5 billion away is 8.5 billion dollars yeah Microsoft really loves going under 10. but we'll see how long that lasts you mentioned a little app called WhatsApp which was purchased by Facebook so obviously we know how big WhatsApp is now whenever people talk about iMessage and RCS everyone's like stop talking about this American BS we use WhatsApp in this country and it really is used by a lot of people around the world if it helps there are two answers I'll accept for this because it was the announced price which include a lot of stock and there's the price when it closed at which was a different price 12 billion dollars they initially offered 16 billion dollars to buy the time it closed it was worth 19 billion oh my God it grew we're gonna have to start shifting some of these because I'm running out of space PayPal purchasing honey I didn't even know this was a thing PayPal bought honey in 2020. it's free if you don't know honey is an extension that you add to your browser to let you know if you're paying the lowest price on something there's obviously a lot of money in that I'm sure there's affiliate revenue and stuff that honey also grabs from I think PayPal probably sees the value in that because they are also one of the biggest e-commerce entities literally heard nothing about this but at least I know what both of these companies do I know I said this earlier but are coupons really that valuable two billion dollars four billion dollars for coupons I can't believe PayPal paid more money for honey than Apple paid for Beats when did this happen again 2020 oh okay so everyone was just gratuitously spending during the pandemic and this is one of those little uh acquisition babies that happened as a result this is an A and B acquisition I'm gonna let you figure out how to pronounce this x i l i n x zelix what do they do because I've never heard of this company before so it's a little bit more of a B2B company so they actually invented the first fpga and they have a fabulous business model which is essentially how you design chips but don't create them to yourself 20 minutes later head empty look I love building PCS I love following PC Hardware from time to time I ain't no Linus Tech tips this is like one of those things where it is way outside my wheelhouse but what I do know is that these silicon companies have a lot of money and when they spend they spend what part of the board is that calling to you right now this took a couple of years to do so that means there has to be a lot of money on the table so I'm guessing like here in this empty space in my mind I'm like Price is Right rules I'm just gonna go slightly above 26 billion dollars and one cent no uh let's say 30 billion dollars hop are we talking like here or here 45 billion dollars no higher what 50 billion dollars I spit a lot on this table that's how much that 50 billion dollars if it's designing chips this is stuff that could make its way into AMD Hardware in the next five or so years right all this stuff happens way into the future so these are like pure strategy moves you don't want Intel buying this in foreign company you don't want Qualcomm buying this company AMD is not playing games they want to succeed in the market 50 billion dollars though kind of a lot of money I'm gonna just guess that there's probably something here and a few more down here we're gonna have to ship this down a certain Elon Musk purchasing Twitter I actually forgot how much he bought it for where he actually landed he had the spat where he's like oh Twitter's not worth this amount because there were a lot of spam accounts on there it went to court but they uh he basically settled before any kind of final decisions were made he's just like I'm tired of this let me just buy it for 40 billion dollars close 24. 44. okay I'll take it I'll take it close enough Tesla SpaceX boring dude yeah not even important Google buying Fitbit Google buying companies is like a Death Wish because Google likes to change its mind a lot it doesn't like to hold on to the project that it starts now when it buys another company they could just want to integrate it into whatever they're doing for like a year or two and if it doesn't work out we have the tech we have the patents but Fitbit though is a bit of a strategic one because obviously Google has wear OS which pairs with Android very well and Fitbit plays into that especially in the pixel watch so it's not like Google gave up on Fitbit and in fact the Fitbit watches are surprisingly good from what I've heard from some tech reviewers but Fitbit was also big back in the day I used one of their earlier rudimentary fitness trackers I can tell you this is a recent one this was went through in 2021 I thought this was like before the 2020s let's say 11 billion 2.1 wow that's way less than I was expecting it's almost like insignificant enough to even show up on camera look at that I'm gonna move these plants somewhere else now HP buying compact I remember this is when I was starting to be cognizant of tech companies and specifically computers at the time I think I must have been in like first or second grade or something like that so that dates me and some of the compact Presario started to look like HP computers I'm like this is weird and then just looking at like CNET for news saw that there was an acquisition I'm like that makes a lot of sense but how much was that merger though I was too young to even remember what numbers were four billion dollars is it really more than that did we even have that much money in the GDP 22 billion dollars 25 25. wow if we're not counting inflation which is a very important part of this but we don't think that far ahead realistically this is probably like up here Microsoft purchasing xenomax which of course includes Bethesda Arcane and its software xenomax that sounds like a pill that you take when you want to get more excited if you're happier than four hours if Activision was 50 to 60 30 billion dollars incorrect 7.5 oh Indie devs how about another one Microsoft purchasing Activision with this one because this deal has not closed as recording this video and is currently under challenge so this one's a little bit of a grain of salt yeah man look we get it the Federal Trade Commission loves PlayStation so whether or not that's a good thing or not is up to debate I personally like it because I think Activision needs a lot of help uh blizzard needs a lot of help yes I do see Sony's concerns about there being some Shenanigans with exclusives and whatnot but Call of Duty is a pretty big game I don't think Microsoft would just want their thing to be on one platform because I don't think they'll benefit from it why not just make money from everyone 60 billion dollars 68.7 68.7 on the wrong side of the 60s but close enough for me man they couldn't have just rounded up to 69. nice I'm already kind of mad that like this is just chump change for companies to buy all these other companies but like I can't go into McDonald's and afford a Sprite Vodafone purchasing man's man man's man mansman was originally a steel pipe manufacturer that branched out into lots of different Industries in the 90s the biggest success was their Telecom division where they became one of the biggest competitors in the space which meant that Vodafone wanted them so badly that they did a hostile takeover of the company in the year 2000. like I've been to Europe a few times and I know that they are one of the largest telecoms in the world m-a-n-n-e-s that's literally not right you can see where I had the stroke like right here I have no sense of scale for how big this company is man's man I mean that sounds like a place where you buy suits I guarantee it hostile takeovers especially if they happen last minute there's probably a lot of money involved you're buying a lot of shares in a company I mean look we have Sprint and T-Mobile up here at 26 billion dollars and that was even after all of like the Sprint with thought Bank uh let's say 30 billion dollars oh 30 billion is pretty high what's it like 80 billion dollars no it's more I could buy a whole Lamborghini with that money 100 billion dollars no no no oh God don't do it really more this board doesn't even matter anymore it's like it's like up here 200 billion at the time in 2000 Vodafone purchased man's man for 183 billion dollars which is 297 billion dollars today AKA 37 in history that's more than some countries GDP actually not kidding in fact let me know do you have that much money if so call metoday on the channel we're trying something different we're going to line up some of the biggest Tech Acquisitions ever made I even have a little magnetic thing here this is wait wrong channel oh Microsoft purchasing Nokia's mobile division so these two companies have a pretty decorated past I mean now we have products like the surface Duo which you know exists for better and for worse but I think some of the best hardware that's come out of Microsoft really was with that Nokia partnership who they acquired back in when was it 2014 2014 got some excellent colors the UI on Windows phone was some of the best and it was absolutely smooth unfortunately IOS and Android were way too popular for that to take off but there's still a part of me that would love to go back to those Glory Days where all three were competing in pure Harmony how much do you think Microsoft spent buying the mobile division of note I think Nokio needed a little bit of saving after not jumping on to the smartphone train early enough I'll say five billion dollars close 7.2 billion dollars I'll tell you every single one of these is with a B I'll put this healthy low like there hopefully my sense of scale works for this T-Mobile purchasing Sprint so if we're looking at us telecoms for those of you outside of this country there were four big cellular carriers Verizon's up top then a t then T-Mobile and then Sprint or was it the other way around all that matters is that the two smallest carriers wanted to merge to take on the two bigger ones and it was definitely met with some scrutiny I can tell you as a lifelong T-Mobile customer my parents have been with them and I'm on their family plan I've been with them for the past 15 years actually no it might even be more than that when did The Voice stream thing happen some of you probably weren't even born yet new Fair T-Mobile did purchase Sprint it was not an actual merger it was an acquisition although both companies started sharing assets especially you know cellular Spectrum you kind of need it when Verizon has service literally everywhere and even the same for at T T-Mobile really wanted to play ball but how much was that really worth telecoms will around 25 billion dollars 26. I'm really good at this boy we have quite the sliding scale here I think it's gonna go like boom well I even have room for everything on this list I guess we gotta find out Intel purchasing mobile eye mobile eye so this list probably has a lot of Acquisitions of big companies that I probably don't even know what they do okay are you gonna tell me what they do I can tell you what they do okay so mobile was founded in 1999 although it was only until 2008 that they've created their first Hardware but they are in the automotive space specifically with an eye towards self-driving and assistant driving tools so they actually used to have a partnership with Tesla although that kind of went away because an autopilot car crashed and they didn't want to be responsible what a Tesla crashing no way mobile tech is found in a ton of current cars including the Mustang Mach e F-150 BMW IX as well as the Nissan Aria with many many more and they were purchased by Intel in 2017. for no reason other than I just have no idea what the value of this company is I'm just gonna say billion dollars 15 billion dollars some of you'll be like 10. stop scripting this 15 billion 15 billion dollars Apple purchasing beats beats has had a bit of an Infamous past very popular headphones but extremely overhyped while the brand is certainly not in the public eye as much as it used to be the hive might have you know fizzled out a little bit it's certainly cool that beats have Apple's Hardware in it to work with iPhones better than most other third parties will actually no I guess that makes them first party now doesn't it this is Apple's largest acquisition in their history and it was taken place in 2014. beats was a very valuable company I mean you saw a lot of athletes wearing their stuff Billboards everywhere they were kind of a fashion statement so makes a lot of sense that Apple would want them in their portfolio 35 billion dollars you were almost exactly correct three billion we're going back to Microsoft a little bit of an older School acquisition when they purchased Skype that's something I haven't heard in a while everyone and their grandmothers used it to talk over the Internet fun fact at one point Skype comprised 40 of all international phone calls 40 that's how I talk to all of my friends a lot of the people that I know are actually spread out across numerous countries we didn't have WhatsApp at least it wasn't as popular as it is now and same thing with Discord there's a lot of people that love to use these things to talk to basically anyone and anywhere back then Skype really was the best option I guess you can also argue that Microsoft also killed Skype I mean you should say something that we use teams and not Skype these days I'm sure there's a lot of tech on the back end that's borrowed from Skype to put into teams because they own the IP I'm gonna say two billion dollars 6.5 billion away is 8.5 billion dollars yeah Microsoft really loves going under 10. but we'll see how long that lasts you mentioned a little app called WhatsApp which was purchased by Facebook so obviously we know how big WhatsApp is now whenever people talk about iMessage and RCS everyone's like stop talking about this American BS we use WhatsApp in this country and it really is used by a lot of people around the world if it helps there are two answers I'll accept for this because it was the announced price which include a lot of stock and there's the price when it closed at which was a different price 12 billion dollars they initially offered 16 billion dollars to buy the time it closed it was worth 19 billion oh my God it grew we're gonna have to start shifting some of these because I'm running out of space PayPal purchasing honey I didn't even know this was a thing PayPal bought honey in 2020. it's free if you don't know honey is an extension that you add to your browser to let you know if you're paying the lowest price on something there's obviously a lot of money in that I'm sure there's affiliate revenue and stuff that honey also grabs from I think PayPal probably sees the value in that because they are also one of the biggest e-commerce entities literally heard nothing about this but at least I know what both of these companies do I know I said this earlier but are coupons really that valuable two billion dollars four billion dollars for coupons I can't believe PayPal paid more money for honey than Apple paid for Beats when did this happen again 2020 oh okay so everyone was just gratuitously spending during the pandemic and this is one of those little uh acquisition babies that happened as a result this is an A and B acquisition I'm gonna let you figure out how to pronounce this x i l i n x zelix what do they do because I've never heard of this company before so it's a little bit more of a B2B company so they actually invented the first fpga and they have a fabulous business model which is essentially how you design chips but don't create them to yourself 20 minutes later head empty look I love building PCS I love following PC Hardware from time to time I ain't no Linus Tech tips this is like one of those things where it is way outside my wheelhouse but what I do know is that these silicon companies have a lot of money and when they spend they spend what part of the board is that calling to you right now this took a couple of years to do so that means there has to be a lot of money on the table so I'm guessing like here in this empty space in my mind I'm like Price is Right rules I'm just gonna go slightly above 26 billion dollars and one cent no uh let's say 30 billion dollars hop are we talking like here or here 45 billion dollars no higher what 50 billion dollars I spit a lot on this table that's how much that 50 billion dollars if it's designing chips this is stuff that could make its way into AMD Hardware in the next five or so years right all this stuff happens way into the future so these are like pure strategy moves you don't want Intel buying this in foreign company you don't want Qualcomm buying this company AMD is not playing games they want to succeed in the market 50 billion dollars though kind of a lot of money I'm gonna just guess that there's probably something here and a few more down here we're gonna have to ship this down a certain Elon Musk purchasing Twitter I actually forgot how much he bought it for where he actually landed he had the spat where he's like oh Twitter's not worth this amount because there were a lot of spam accounts on there it went to court but they uh he basically settled before any kind of final decisions were made he's just like I'm tired of this let me just buy it for 40 billion dollars close 24. 44. okay I'll take it I'll take it close enough Tesla SpaceX boring dude yeah not even important Google buying Fitbit Google buying companies is like a Death Wish because Google likes to change its mind a lot it doesn't like to hold on to the project that it starts now when it buys another company they could just want to integrate it into whatever they're doing for like a year or two and if it doesn't work out we have the tech we have the patents but Fitbit though is a bit of a strategic one because obviously Google has wear OS which pairs with Android very well and Fitbit plays into that especially in the pixel watch so it's not like Google gave up on Fitbit and in fact the Fitbit watches are surprisingly good from what I've heard from some tech reviewers but Fitbit was also big back in the day I used one of their earlier rudimentary fitness trackers I can tell you this is a recent one this was went through in 2021 I thought this was like before the 2020s let's say 11 billion 2.1 wow that's way less than I was expecting it's almost like insignificant enough to even show up on camera look at that I'm gonna move these plants somewhere else now HP buying compact I remember this is when I was starting to be cognizant of tech companies and specifically computers at the time I think I must have been in like first or second grade or something like that so that dates me and some of the compact Presario started to look like HP computers I'm like this is weird and then just looking at like CNET for news saw that there was an acquisition I'm like that makes a lot of sense but how much was that merger though I was too young to even remember what numbers were four billion dollars is it really more than that did we even have that much money in the GDP 22 billion dollars 25 25. wow if we're not counting inflation which is a very important part of this but we don't think that far ahead realistically this is probably like up here Microsoft purchasing xenomax which of course includes Bethesda Arcane and its software xenomax that sounds like a pill that you take when you want to get more excited if you're happier than four hours if Activision was 50 to 60 30 billion dollars incorrect 7.5 oh Indie devs how about another one Microsoft purchasing Activision with this one because this deal has not closed as recording this video and is currently under challenge so this one's a little bit of a grain of salt yeah man look we get it the Federal Trade Commission loves PlayStation so whether or not that's a good thing or not is up to debate I personally like it because I think Activision needs a lot of help uh blizzard needs a lot of help yes I do see Sony's concerns about there being some Shenanigans with exclusives and whatnot but Call of Duty is a pretty big game I don't think Microsoft would just want their thing to be on one platform because I don't think they'll benefit from it why not just make money from everyone 60 billion dollars 68.7 68.7 on the wrong side of the 60s but close enough for me man they couldn't have just rounded up to 69. nice I'm already kind of mad that like this is just chump change for companies to buy all these other companies but like I can't go into McDonald's and afford a Sprite Vodafone purchasing man's man man's man mansman was originally a steel pipe manufacturer that branched out into lots of different Industries in the 90s the biggest success was their Telecom division where they became one of the biggest competitors in the space which meant that Vodafone wanted them so badly that they did a hostile takeover of the company in the year 2000. like I've been to Europe a few times and I know that they are one of the largest telecoms in the world m-a-n-n-e-s that's literally not right you can see where I had the stroke like right here I have no sense of scale for how big this company is man's man I mean that sounds like a place where you buy suits I guarantee it hostile takeovers especially if they happen last minute there's probably a lot of money involved you're buying a lot of shares in a company I mean look we have Sprint and T-Mobile up here at 26 billion dollars and that was even after all of like the Sprint with thought Bank uh let's say 30 billion dollars oh 30 billion is pretty high what's it like 80 billion dollars no it's more I could buy a whole Lamborghini with that money 100 billion dollars no no no oh God don't do it really more this board doesn't even matter anymore it's like it's like up here 200 billion at the time in 2000 Vodafone purchased man's man for 183 billion dollars which is 297 billion dollars today AKA 37 in history that's more than some countries GDP actually not kidding in fact let me know do you have that much money if so call me