Reuters quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying that Broadcom’s plan to acquire cloud computing company VMware for US$61 billion will be approved by the European Union on Wednesday. Conditional antitrust approval.
As of the close of U.S. stocks on July 11, Botong closed at $882.05 per share, up 0.49%, with a market value of $364.009 billion; while VMware rose 5.29% to $151.53 per share, with a market value of $65.212 billion.
After months of negotiations with the EU, Broadcom has signed up to behavioural remedies, including a pledge to introduce interoperability standards to its technology to help rival Marvell compete more fairly, the source said.
In April this year, the European Commission stressed that it would not approve the acquisition unless there were adequate remedies. They argued that the deal could lead to “higher prices, lower quality and less innovation” for enterprise customers.
Broadcom last month successfully addressed European Commission concerns over its Fiber Channel host bus adapter (FC HBA) by offering an interoperability remedy to rival Marvell Technology, Reuters said.
At present, Broadcom is already the leading supplier in the field of FC HBA, which uses the Fiber Channel protocol to connect the server to the storage adapter located outside the server on the storage area network.
The VMware deal is Broadcom’s largest-ever acquisition as it looks to diversify into enterprise software. It is worth mentioning that the US Federal Trade Commission and the UK competition agency are also reviewing the deal.
