Adobe and Figma ended their $20 billion acquisition dream this morning after regulators signaled it would continue to be rough going.
Figma still gets a $1 billion consolation prize as part of the deal, and as the leader in collaborative design, should land on its feet just fine.
Adobe put on a brave face in their public statement, but it has to be deeply disappointed with this outcome.
Figma, for its part, has not stood still since the deal was announced, proceeding and planning as the independent company it is.
If he is right, that’s precisely why Adobe wanted to buy the company because it saw that too.
Adobe’s $20 billion mega-bid to buy rival Figma is now officially dead, after the companies said today that regulatory pushback in Europe had caused them to put an end to the acquisition plans.
First announced in September last year, the deal was always going to attract regulatory scrutiny due to the size of the transaction and the fact that it took one of Adobe’s major rivals out of the picture.
Irrespective of that outcome, the two companies were already facing significant headwinds in Europe.
As a result of all this, Adobe will now have to pay Figma a termination fee of $1 billion, which was contractually payable in the event of the transaction failing to attain regulatory clearance — or if it failed to close within 18 months of the acquisition’s announcement last September.
That 18-month stipulation hadn’t yet been reached, and no regulatory body had actually announced their final findings — but Adobe and Figma clearly saw no way through this, and with the DoJ also weighing up regulatory action, in the end it just made more sense to pull the plug on the deal entirely.
Adobe and Typoface had been rivals since Adobe acquired Encarta in 2001. The two companies announced a $20 billion merger last year, but the DOJ is reportedly getting ready to…
