Microsoft is planning to officially close its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard on Friday, October 13, according to sources cited by The Verge.
That plan is subject to final approval from the United Kingdom regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority. The CMA was famously the only regulator to successfully block the deal in late April, motivating its decision with the danger to the competitiveness of the nascent cloud market potentially caused by Microsoft’s ownership of Activision Blizzard’s prized franchises.
Microsoft initially rebelled against the ruling, starting an appeal process at the Competition Appeal Tribunal. However, the appeal was halted with a joint motion filed in July when Microsoft opened up to further concessions on the cloud market. Those negotiations lasted around a month, resulting in a restructured transaction where Microsoft agreed to sell the cloud streaming rights of Activision Blizzard games to a third party (Ubisoft). The effort paid off, as the UK regulator gave its provisional approval to the restructured deal a couple of weeks ago. Today is the last day for third parties to voice their opinions on the new deal; the CMA is expected to provide its final decision last week.
Even after closing the acquisition, Microsoft will still have to deal with the US Federal Trade Commission. Technically, the US regulator was the first to sue to block the deal in December 2022, though it didn’t seem in any rush to actually do so at first. The first evidentiary hearing before the administrative law judge was originally set for August 2nd. However, when it was clear that Microsoft might close the deal imminently, the FTC filed a motion to get an injunction from a federal court to block that from happening. Less than a month later, Microsoft won in court as Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the Northern District of California ruled.
The FTC is still appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose decision is supposed to be released in early December. Meanwhile, it also resumed its internal lawsuit, now set to restart twenty-one days after the ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The FTC could seek to disband the acquisition, but it’d be a long and arduous process for the regulator.
Meanwhile, if Microsoft does close the Activision Blizzard deal nearly twenty months after the announcement, it’ll become the largest tech merger ever.
