Is Apple buying McLaren Automotive?

Late last night (Indian Standard Time), rumours of tech giant Apple in talks with McLaren Automotive group for a buyout swept across the Internet like a wildfire. Originally reported by the Financial Times, the rumours have said to originate through three different insiders at the automotive company. McLaren was quick to deny the rumours with a one-line official statement that read, "We can confirm that McLaren is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment."

McLaren's road car business is owned partly by the Bahraini sovereign wealth fund known as Mumtalakat that owns 50% stake. That said, this fund has no investment or stake in the extremely valuable McLaren Applied Technologies Group or the Formula 1 team. Although we will be keeping a close eye on this story, we must ask the obvious question - Why would Apple consider buying a speciality carmaker with a very small mass-market potential unless it wants to get into some sort of motorsport activity?

To begin with, McLaren's technical division has made several inroads into the hybrid and lightweight technologies which could be very valuable (from a patents perspective) to Apple and it's automotive plans for the future. Apple could also be looking into some sort of motorsport inroads with the McLaren group. A motorsport partnership with the McLaren F1 team could also eventually mean a mass market partnership with Honda considering the fact that Formula 1 team works very closely with Honda for its powerplant solutions.

In the larger scheme of things, the acquisition of McLaren could also be a starter point for Apple who in the current scheme of things could actually consider buying out a much larger automotive group which could mean direct inroads for apple into the global automotive business. According to Forbes, Apple is the world's eight largest company with market value of about $586 Billion. Comparatively, Toyota, which is at number 10 on the Forbes list is values at $177 Billion. Volkswagen comes in at number 22 and is valued currently at about $73.1 Billion after the recent slump in share prices due to the Dieselgate scandal.

This raises the question - is Apple just testing waters with a speciality car company like McLaren before considering a buyout of a much larger and more relevant car maker?

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)