Apple hands its deal team back to the CFO who scrapped its cash target

If a chip startup gets a call from Apple's corporate development team, the useful question now is who those people answer to. Since 2019 the answer ran through the services organization. ^[5] Now it is the finance chief. ^[1]

Steve Smith takes the deal team, replacing Adrian Perica, who had run it for more than a decade, and Smith reports to CFO Kevan Parekh. ^[1][7] Bloomberg calls Smith Perica's "longtime lieutenant." ^[2] Parekh is the executive who used Apple's May earnings call to drop the net-cash-neutral policy the company adopted in 2018, saying Apple would now look at cash and debt separately. ^[11] The company was sitting on about $54B in net cash, and analysts read the change as room to buy. ^[12][10]

Apple does not buy often or big. Its largest deal is still the $3B Beats purchase from 2014. ^[13] But it paid about $2B for the Israeli AI firm Q.ai this year, roughly two-thirds the Beats figure. ^[14][17] The Next Web reported in July that Apple had approached bankers and chip startups about buying its way out of an AI server problem. ^[15]

The deal team does two jobs. It buys companies, and it negotiates partnerships, including the standing arrangement that makes Google the default search engine and the 2024 deal that put ChatGPT into Apple products. ^[8] Where that team reports is a signal to anyone on the other side of the table.

For a founder selling to Apple, the practical step is to work out which organization owns the conversation, because the two now sit under different executives with different incentives. For a competitor, the thing to note is that acquisitions now sit under the executive who dropped the cash target, a change analysts read as room to buy.

Perica is not being pushed out. He keeps iCloud, Fitness+ and Apple News, reports directly to Eddy Cue, and is seen inside Apple as a candidate to eventually succeed him. ^[3][4] The changes land weeks into the tenure of John Ternus, who replaced Tim Cook as chief executive on 1 September. ^[9] Apple declined to comment. ^[16]