Green signal has been given to Microsoft-Nokia’s deal by two of the toughest regulators in world. Earlier US department of justice and now European commission has provided their approvals. The notice of approval from the US Justice Department was posted on the Federal Trade Commission website. The European commission has approved the deal yesterday. The commission mentions in its notice,
In 2012, almost 700 million smartphones and 162 million tablets were sold worldwide. The Commission assessed the effects of the acquisition on competition in the field of smart mobile devices (including smartphones and tablets). The Commission found that the overlap of the two companies’ activities in this area is minimal and several strong rivals, such as Samsung and Apple will continue to compete with the merged entity.
The Commission also investigated a number the vertical relationships between the merged entity’s activities in the downstream market for smart mobile devices and Microsoft’s upstream activities in mobile operating systems (OS), mobile applications (apps) and enterprise mail server software and related communication protocols.
With these approvals in place, the MS-Nokia deal is almost through. There are some hurdles in form of tax issues in India but they are hardly going to impact the deal anyways.
