Apple is considering buying carmaker McLaren, report says
Apple is considering buying British automotive manufacturer McLaren Technology Group, and is currently in talks with the company, according to a new report from Matthew Garrahan and Tim Bradshaw at the Financial Times.
Apple is also bouncing around the idea of a strategic investment as another option, though FT's sources say an acquisition is also being discussed.
The price for McLaren Technology Group? Between £1bn and £1.5bn, according to the report.
McLaren is a supercar maker, and it runs a British Formula 1 racing team.
Earlier this year, F1 blogger Joe Saward floated the possibility that Apple was laying the groundwork to buy the entire racing series.
F1 was eventually sold to Liberty Media for $8.5 billion, although the deal is not final.
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McLaren, a British company, loses money, according to the Financial Times report. It lost £22.6 million on revenue of £265 million in 2014, the most recent figures that are publicly available.
Obviously, the news of talks between McLaren and Apple will renew speculation about what products and services the computer and iPhone company is planning in the automotive industry.
Apple famously has a car department, codenamed "Project Titan," but the company has never confirmed that it is in fact working on an electric car or self-driving software.
Apple has recently focused its attention on self-driving car software, instead of the manufacturing processes that would go into making its own car, according to a slew of recent reports.
But Apple's core corporate strengths are design, supply chain management, and manufacturing processes, all of which lend strength to the argument that if Apple were to do a car, it would design both the hardware and software, as it does for the iPhone.
An investment or purchase in McLaren would give Apple an injection of racing technology, as well as a team of automotive-focused engineers. McLaren also owns several valuable patents, especially for high-tech materials such as carbon fiber and aluminum. It does manufacturing research and studies materials in its McLaren Applied Technologies group.
McLaren Technologies Group also does substantial work with sensors and data in a department called McLaren Electronic Systems. For example, the company compares real-time data collected during races with historical data, which means that it has solved several problems dealing with the flood of data a connected car generates.
One of the challenges Apple's car project faces is dealing and analyzing the flood of data generated by its sensor-laden test vehicles currently driving around California.
Apple has invested in a company in the transportation world before. The company invested $1 billion earlier this year in Didi Chuxing. "From a Didi point of view, we see that as, one, a great financial investment. Two, we think that there are some strategic things that the companies can do together over time," Cook said.
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