Amazon Drops iRobot Acquisition After EU Veto Threat

Bloomberg2024-01-29

EU competition watchdog was preparing to block takeoverTech giant to pay $94 million to iRobot over deal terminationAmazon.com Inc. has abandoned its planned $1.4 billion acquisition of Roomba maker ...

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lanzier
2024-01-29
lanzier
欧盟才是世界进步的绊脚石

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The breakup also spares Amazon the task of stemming the losses incurred by Bedford, Massachusetts-based iRobot, which has seen its fortunes sour in recent years.The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm that oversees antitrust, is generally known to opt for remedies that correct any risks to fair competition, rather than ban mergers outright. But companies often short-circuit the process by choosing to abandon deals that appear to be headed for a veto.Amazon’s move, which comes with a $94 million termination fee to be paid to iRobot — follows a similar decision recently from Adobe Inc. executives, who walked away from a planned $20 billion acquisition of startup Figma Inc. after locking horns with antitrust regulators in the EU and the UK.Amazon decided not to offer remedies to concerns flagged by regulators. The commission had earlier warned Amazon could be tempted to demote other robot vacuum cleaners on its platform and promote its own products with such labels as “Amazon’s choice” or “Works With Alexa.” The regulator also said Amazon may find it “economically profitable” to shut out rivals, and had attempted to pressure Amazon into offering concessions in order to get the green light in Brussels, to no avail.While the company considered an appeal, that process was likely to take years, people familiar with the matter said, speaking anonymously to discuss an ongoing investigation. The merger agreement expires this summer and the companies had already renegotiated the terms once; last year after iRobot was forced to secure a $200 million financing facility, and Amazon cut its per-share offer by about 15%.Amazon, which builds the Alexa voice assistant and a wide range of home electronics, announced its intention to acquire iRobot in August 2022, a move that would have expanded its foothold in the burgeoning market for smart-home gadgets. The Seattle-based company has also developed its own home robotics franchise with Astro, a $1,600 home security bot it has started marketing as a business security guard.IRobot’s sales have fallen as pandemic-era home improvement splurges petered out. The company, which had been consistently profitable since its 2005 initial public offering, has racked up about $500 million in net losses since the second quarter of 2021.Amazon and iRobot have been close partners for years. The retailer has long been iRobot’s biggest customer, at times accounting for more than a quarter of sales (iRobot in 2021 stopped disclosing the identity of its biggest customer, which, during the most recently reported quarter, accounted for about 22% of revenue.) The vacuum maker, meanwhile, is a customer of the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing group, and has dispatched executives to speak at Amazon events.Though small for a company the size of Amazon, an iRobot acquisition would be the fourth-biggest in its history, trailing only its purchases of Whole Foods Market, movie studio MGM and the One Medical concierge health-care service.Regulators in Europe and the US are increasingly skeptical of Big Tech’s dealmaking. In September, the EU regulator nixed Booking Holdings Inc.’s €1.6 billion ($1.7 billion) bid for Sweden’s Etraveli Group and the bloc is in the very early stages of looking into Microsoft Corp.’s partnership with OpenAI. In the US, the Biden administration set a record for merger challenges.The European Commission and US Federal Trade Commission were both preparing to try to block Amazon’s takeover of iRobot, which regulators felt would unfairly compromise competition with similar appliances, people familiar with the matter had said. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority had cleared the acquisition in June.The EU’s opposition to Amazon’s iRobot acquisition highlights the tension between Amazon’s retail operations and its ambitions for the smart-home ecosystem built around its Alexa voice assistant. The FTC has also expressed concern that the deal would give Amazon too much control over the smart-home device market and potentially violate users’ privacy by giving the company access to data on their homes.","kind":"news","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":true,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0},"commentList":[{"id":268352088654160,"gmtCreate":1706538599136,"gmtModify":1706538600696,"author":{"id":"3477648757949014","authorId":"3477648757949014","name":"lanzier","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c263a28956df296843cbae991cb53f76","vip":1,"crmLevel":3,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"3477648757949014","authorIdStr":"3477648757949014"},"htmlText":"欧盟才是世界进步的绊脚石","listText":"欧盟才是世界进步的绊脚石","text":"欧盟才是世界进步的绊脚石","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/268352088654160","repostId":1135178788,"repostType":2,"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"}],"isCommentEnd":false,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":0,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":1,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":false,"deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.29.4","shortVersion":"4.29.4","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"laohu8","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/1135178788"}