Bose buys McIntosh, storied maker of high-end luxury audio equipment
The BOSE display at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Bose Corp. will purchase the McIntosh Group, a deal that will give the Massachusetts-based company control of one of the most storied names in high-end audio.
McIntosh will continue to manufacture the high-end audio equipment it is known for out of its longtime headquarters in Binghamton, New York, Bose CEO Lila Snyder said. The deal also includes Sonus Faber, a company that makes high-end speakers by hand in Italy.
The purchase of the two audio workshops provides Bose access into the high-end luxury audio market, Snyder told CNBC in an interview.
“There is this opportunity for luxury, where the consumer is more discerning, really interested in the heritage and the story, and that handcrafted nature,” she said.
Snyder, who took over as Bose CEO in 2020, did not provide terms or a price for the deal. McIntosh was previously owned by Highlander Partners, a Dallas-based private equity firm.
McIntosh has been making high-end amplifiers and other audio equipment since 1949, and one of its devices can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Sonus Faber sells a pair of speakers that costs $140,000.
The purchase shows how Bose is navigating an environment where there is more competition in headphones and audio electronics than ever. Bose is privately held and doesn’t share annual revenue, although it had about $3 billion in sales in 2023, according to Forbes. It has about 3,000 employees.
Bose enters the high-end luxury audio market
Luxury audio — defined as products that cost more than $5,000 — grew 12% in 2023 to about $2.8 billion in total sales, according to an estimate from Futuresource Consulting. The deal will allow Bose to test a higher-end market for its products, which are already expensive – a pair of Bose headphones can easily cost $350.
“These are different customers that right now we’re not really reaching with our technology and with our products,” she said.
Snyder did not rule out the possibility of Bose producing McIntosh-branded headphones or other products.
“We do think there’s a real opportunity around wearables in the luxury and high-performance space as well, which is something that we would expect you to see from us down the road,” Synder said.
Bose is best-known for its speakers and its headphones, including the QuietComfort headphones line, which was one of the first noise-canceling headsets to hit the market in 2000. It also sells soundbars, wireless earbuds, speakers and audio equipment for cars. It divested a group that built sound systems for auditoriums and other professional environments last year.
The audio market has grown since Bose was one of the few high-end brands.
Bose now competes against some of the biggest companies in the world, including Apple, which bought Beats Electronics for $3 billion in 2014 and released the AirPods in 2016, targeting the premium headphone market.
There is also new audio-focused competition for Bose.
Sonos, which was best known for its in-home speakers, introduced its first noise-canceling headphones earlier this year, although the company is reeling from an app redesign in May that was received poorly by users. Bose also spent the past decade competing with smart speakers from the likes of Amazon and Google that were often priced aggressively low to spur adoption.
The purchase of the two luxury audio workshops could help Bose grow in the in-car stereo market, which Snyder said makes up about a third of the company’s overall business. Sonus Faber produces speakers for Lamborghini cars, for example, and some Jeeps have a McIntosh-branded audio system. One possibility that Bose is excited about is that it can integrate its noise-canceling technology in electric cars to make the vehicle ride quieter, she said.
“There are places today where the Bose brand probably can’t go. Lamborghini is a great example of that,” Snyder said. “You really want the very best kind of cutting-edge technology to be in those luxury or highest-performing vehicles.”
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Read the full Bloomberg story here.
— CNBC’s Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.
WATCH: Gemini delivering well for Google, says Check Capital’s Chris Ballard
CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
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