EU Will Look At Smaller Acquisitions Made By Big Tech

Europe’s top competition authority will look into smaller acquisitions made by big technology giants after a “shopping spree” in recent years by American firms, as regulators in the region look to ramp up pressure on major US players.

According to CNBC, the continent has been a hot bed of technology acquisitions by major US firms over the last decade, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence.

High-profile purchases like the US$8.5 billion Microsoft paid for Skype in 2011 or the US$19 billion Facebook bought WhatsApp for in 2014 often make the headlines, but there are dozens of other smaller acquisitions that have happened.

Last year for example, Apple bought Spectral Edge for an undisclosed sum. It’s a UK-based start-up working on photography technology. Twitter meanwhile acquired Fabula AI, another UK-based artificial intelligence firm. There are many more examples like this involving other technology giants such as Alphabet and Facebook.

These smaller acquisitions haven’t warranted much attention from the European Union’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager, though that could change.

“What we will try to do is to find ways to make sure that we see these acquisitions because sometimes these businesses are quite small, and maybe the sums, the turnover will not meet our thresholds,” Vestager told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro in an interview on Tuesday, February 18.

“What we would like to see (is) if that would … make an entrenched position even more entrenched. So we are developing methods to make sure that we actually see these acquisitions, to make sure that it is pro-competition, it is pro-innovation, and not the opposite,” she added.

Vestager did not expand on what these “methods” would be.

The EU’s competition commissioner said big tech firms have gone on a “shopping spree” in Europe, calling it a “positive.”

“One could see that as a kind of distributed innovation that happens here, but then being bought and integrated in giant companies. And that of course is … positive to see that the ecosystem works,” Vestager told CNBC.

Full Content: CNBC

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