For more than a decade, the executive Apple turned to when it wanted to buy a company was Adrian Perica. That arrangement quietly changed this week, when the company told employees that Steve Smith, a longtime lieutenant under Perica, would take over as head of mergers and acquisitions, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Smith will report to Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh. The move returns Apple’s M&A team to the finance division for the first time since 2019, when Perica began reporting directly to the chief executive, then Tim Cook.
Perica is not leaving. He will shift full time onto the services leadership team and continue to oversee iCloud, Fitness+ and News, the businesses he has led since 2023, reporting to services chief Eddy Cue.
The reshuffle is part of a wider reordering of Apple’s services operation. Carson Oliver has been promoted to App Store vice president, and Cue takes on oversight of the App Store and other teams. Inside the company, Perica and Oliver Schusser are seen as possible successors to Cue, according to people familiar with the matter.
The change says something about how Apple wants to run its balance-sheet work. The company’s acquisitions are famously small and disciplined: dozens of modest technology purchases a year, rarely the blockbuster deals that define its rivals. Returning M&A to finance signals that deal-making is being treated as a capital-allocation function, run alongside buybacks and dividends, rather than a growth arm housed in the chief executive’s office.
Apple has kept its deal book deliberately modest even as its cash has piled up. Its largest acquisition remains the roughly three-billion-dollar purchase of Beats Electronics in 2014, a sum rivals such as Microsoft and Amazon have exceeded many times over on single deals. Apple prefers to buy small teams and technologies – chip designers, machine-learning startups, camera specialists – and fold them into products that ship years later.
That discipline is deliberate. Apple has historically run acquisitions through a small internal team, often with little outside banking help, and has preferred to pay for a handful of engineers who can ship a feature over a whole company that brings distractions. The result is a deal log full of names the public never hears, each one quietly absorbed into Siri, the camera, or the silicon inside the iPhone.
Putting Smith under Parekh restores a structure that existed before 2019, when M&A sat inside finance. Under that model, the chief financial officer owns the deal pipeline, and every proposed purchase competes against other uses of capital on a single ledger. A deal has to clear the same hurdle as a factory or a data center.
The move is also a small bet on restraint. Apple has grown more cautious about what it can buy. Regulators in the United States and Europe have made large technology acquisitions harder to close, and Apple’s market position draws scrutiny to any purchase that touches its ecosystem. A disciplined, finance-run deal team suits a moment when the safest acquisitions are the small ones few people object to.
For Perica, the change concentrates his attention on the part of the business that now drives Apple’s growth. Services – the App Store, iCloud, subscriptions, payments – has become the company’s most dependable engine, with margins far above hardware. Cue has run that division for years, and the leadership changes are widely read as preparation for his eventual succession.
The timing is deliberate. Apple has spent years telling investors that its future depends less on how many iPhones it sells and more on what its installed base generates in recurring revenue. Giving the services division a deeper bench, and handing its leader two credible heirs, fits that story.
Succession talk has hovered over Apple’s services group for some time. Cue has run it for years and is among the longest-serving members of Apple’s leadership. By moving Perica in full time and promoting Oliver, Apple gives its board two tested internal candidates should the top job in services ever open.
Apple declined to comment on the changes, which have not been publicly announced.
Smith inherits a quiet but consequential job. Apple’s M&A team is small relative to the company’s size, but it supplies the raw material for products that ship years later. The person running it decides, in effect, which technologies Apple absorbs rather than builds.
The reshuffle splits two jobs that Perica had been carrying at once: running deals and running part of the services portfolio. By separating them, Apple is signaling that each is a full-time mandate. Whether that produces a faster deal pace is an open question; Apple’s restraint has never been about capacity, but about preference.
For now, the changes are about structure, not strategy. Apple is not about to start writing big checks for public companies. It is, however, making clear that both of the businesses it has relied on for its recent success – the balance sheet and the services catalog – deserve their own full-time leaders, each with a clean line of reporting and a clear mandate.
