Tech giants stand accused of “killer acquisitions”, aimed at smothering potential challengers, and of buying up firms in markets they one day hope to corner. More regulators now fret that such unorthodox mergers snuff out innovation
Miller, the second-largest, in 2016, it had to submit merger filings in more than 30 countries. Today’s Welch wannabes face an ever trickier terrain. For one thing, national trustbusters have mushroomed. Filippo Lancieri, now atZurich, a university, and colleagues find that 127 countries had an antitrust regime in 2010, up from 41 in 1979. Many assess not just a deal’s economic efficiency but things like whether it serves “public interest”. And they are staffing up.
Second, those multiplying regulators are flexing their muscles, partly in response to criticisms that their flaccidity had let business get too oligopolistic. Exhibit A is the bigness of big tech, whose sometimes free products and strong network effects make the old “consumer-welfare standard” seem, in critics’ eyes, unfit for purpose.
That leads to the third complication. In the past, national merger guidelines made it clear when firms needed to seek approval to wed—typically if their combined sales or market share exceeded a certain threshold. When regulators raised concerns about market power, a firm likeInBev could put them to rest by offloading a brewery here and there. Now a potential competitor can come from anywhere; so, too, can a regulatory challenge.
The new antitrust logic is behind a string of recent actions, and not just Grail. In February a lengthyprobe prompted Nvidia, an American semiconductor firm, to abandon its $40bn takeover of Arm, a Japanese-owned firm that licenses chip blueprints. In July theftcvrapp store. Western and Asian regulators are looking into Microsoft’s $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a video-game developer.is dead. Last year saw $3.8trn-worth of deals, a near-record. Most will sail through.
Some deals which would once have been no-brainers are thus no longer worth the hassle. To enemies of big business like Ms Khan, that’s the point. If it means innovation forgone, consumer welfare unrealised or shareholder value not created, tough luck.
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