Microsoft announced back in June its $7.5 billion acquisition of coding website GitHub, pending regulatory review. Acquisitions of this size require the approval of antitrust regulators due to their potential impact on competition. The fate of the deal will soon be determined, at least in Europe, as the EU is expected to issue its antitrust ruling on the matter by October 19.
A filing on the European Commission"s website has revealed that Microsoft requested the EU"s antitrust regulators to hand down its decision on the software giant"s GitHub buyout last Friday, according to Reuters. It"s hard to tell what the outcome of the EU"s regulatory review will be, but there are two possible scenarios: the regulators may approve the deal with certain conditions or launch a probe if it finds major competition concerns.
When the deal was announced, Microsoft gave assurance that GitHub would continue to operate independently post-acquisition, maintaining the freedom of its 28 million developers to choose any operating system or tools they want to use.
The purchase of GitHub marks the Redmond-based company"s biggest acquisition since it bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion. The EU cleared the transaction later that year after Microsoft offered certain concessions to regulators. The tech giant is expected to give similar concessions for the GitHub deal to gain approval.
Source: Reuters