Amazon’s 2018 acquisitions totaled $1.65B, led by PillPack and Ring

Amazon’s annual 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed the high prices the e-commerce giant paid for its two biggest M&A deals last year. According to the filing, the company paid approximately $839 million in cash for Ring and $753 million for PillPack, with all other acquisitions totaling $57 million.

GeekWire was first to spot and report on the filing.

Amazon bought Ring in the early part of the year to shore up its smart home business shortly after its 2017 acquisition of Blink. The deal was then reported to be worth more than a billion dollars. The PillPack deal, meanwhile, took place last summer, and came in around “just under a billion.”

The new filing, however, lists the acquisition prices as “net of cash acquired,” meaning it’s taking into account the cash and liabilities the acquired companies had on the books at the time of their deals. That’s why the final totals are lower than had been reported.

Amazon didn’t detail the prices paid or names of its other 2018 acquisitions, but said the focus was on acquiring “technologies and know-how to enable Amazon to serve customers more effectively.” Some of these had been discovered, though, including Amazon’s acquisition of Tapzo in India for $40 million and cybersecurity company Sqrrl, for example.

At $1.65 billion, this is Amazon’s second biggest year ever for acquisitions, following 2017, when it spent more than $13 billion to buy Whole Foods.