A UK regulator has blocked the Microsoft-Activision merger. But don’t blame it on Brexit.
A UK regulator has blocked the Microsoft-Activision merger. But don’t blame it on Brexit.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has voted to block Microsoft’s $75 billion takeover bid for Activision Blizzard.
Activision makes games — with a massive catalog ranging from Call of Duty to Candy Crush — while Microsoft offers a major distribution platform with its Xbox. The U.K. antitrust watchdog said a merger would hamper innovation and reduce choice for gamers.
To help get the merger through, Microsoft committed to keeping various existing games on competing platforms for a period of time, according to Nicholas Economides, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
But future content remains a concern for regulators, he said. “So Activision maybe produces a new game, and Microsoft has not made the commitment about new games.”
Seven years after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union, there’s still the inclination to blame moves like this on Brexit. But there’s more to it. The U.K. isn’t alone in its concern about competition; the U.S. sued to block the megamerger last year. The U.K., though, has some unique economic challenges right now, said Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School.
“The mood is not good,” she said. “And Brexit, for a lot of people, has had a lot of economic consequences they’re not very happy with.”
Today’s stagnant U.K. economy — with consumers dealing with inflation and a rollback of public services — has fallen short of what Brexiteers promised.
And blocking this merger goes against the spirit of Brexit, argues Peter Holmes, a fellow at the U.K. Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex.
“In a Brexit world, you rein back on regulating business. You let them merge, let them do what they like, and you trust in competition,” he said.
Brexit left the U.K. in part to make such calls on its own. (The EU has yet to decide on the merger.) Iain Begg of the London School of Economics’ European Institute says the decision is less about Brexit than about Britain’s desire to develop lucrative industries. “The government is putting a lot of money on the idea of having a high-tech sector in the U.K.,” he said.
Microsoft said it plans to appeal the U.K. regulator’s decision.
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