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Businessweek profiles Adrian Perica, Apple's wheeling and dealing acquisitions chief

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Over the past few years, Apple has been on an acquisition spree of sorts. In 2013, Apple acquired more than 15 companies, more than it had ever purchased before in a single year. Most recently, Tim Cook relayed that Apple since 2013 has acquired 27 companies.

And greasing the wheels on all of these acquisitions is Apple's mergers and acquisitions point man Adrian Perica. A former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Perica joined Apple in 2009 in order to make Apple's acquisition process a more nimble affair. Indeed, Perica was reportedly hired after Apple acted too slowly to acquire AdMob, only to see it sell to Google for a cool $750 million.

Businessweek on Wednesday published an interesting profile on Perica that's well worth checking out. Like Apple's product plans, not much is known about Perica himself, though we do get an ever so slight peek at the mechanisms he's set up to ensure that Apple's acquisition operations remain running smoothly and efficiently.

Perica was recruited so Apple could move more quickly on deals. He has since built a rapid-reaction force of former investment bankers and MBAs. "Compared to many other public companies, it was a more professional and streamlined process," says Fred Wang, a principal at Trinity Ventures, which was an investor in WifiSlam, a mapping-software company that Apple acquired last year. Perica's team, which on some deals has swelled to include more than 100 staff from across the company, is so well equipped that Apple was able to dispense with the coterie of Wall Street advisers that usually turns up for transactions of this size.

Of course, the big Apple news this week was the company's $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, by far the most exorbitant Apple purchase to date.