The software giant paying vastly over the odds for a small but strategically threatening company should alarm US regulators
The big tech news in a slow week was that the software giant Adobe is planning to pay the unconscionable sum of $20bn (£18bn) to acquire a small company called Figma. Why is this news? Well, first of all, there’s the price – way above any rational valuation of Figma. Second, there’s the question that we have finally learned to ask about tech mergers and acquisitions: is there a competition or antitrust issue here somewhere?
We’ll come to the price later, but at first sight, the answer to the second question would seem to be no: the two companies are not direct competitors. Adobe dominates the market in software for creating and publishing digital and printed material – graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures and print. If you’ve ever used Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader or opened a pdf (portable document format), then you’ve used an Adobe product.
