EU May Give Early Greenlight To Broadcom VMware Deal

US chipmaker Broadcom will seek early European Union antitrust approval of its proposed $61 billion (A$98 billion) acquisition of cloud computing company VMware by pointing to competition from Amazon, Microsoft and Google, people familiar with the matter said.

Announced in May, the deal is the second biggest globally so far this year and marks Broadcom’s attempt to diversify its business into enterprise software.

Tech deals have drawn intense scrutiny from regulators around the world concerned about power concentration in a few players and the possibility of bigger companies acquiring start-ups only to shut them down.

“This (deal) is creating more competition in the cloud market where there are very big players now. This doesn’t have to go to phase two at all,” one of the people said, referring to the European Commission’s four-month long second phase investigation.

“For the Commission to go to phase two, there has to be a real competition problem – horizontal, vertical, foreclosure risk – and I think we can show those risks don’t really exist in this case,” the person said.

“We continue to make progress with our various regulatory filings around the world, with that work moving ahead as expected,” the company said.