Bundeskartellamt clears acquisition of Kustomer by Meta (formerly Facebook)

Meta Platforms Inc., Menlo Park/USA (formerly Facebook, Inc.) has announced that it intends to acquire the company Kustomer Inc. Kustomer is a company based in New York (USA) which offers its business customers a cloud-based customer relationship management platform. The Bundeskartellamt has cleared the project.

The EU Commission also examined the acquisition and on 27 January 2022 cleared it subject to conditions (see also press release of the EU Commission of 27 January 2022 ).

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: “In examining this merger we concentrated on the significance of the acquisition for Meta’s overall strategy. Kustomer may become a relevant element of this in future. However, it is with unease that we ultimately had to acknowledge that the effects of the acquisition would not have warranted a prohibition under existing competition law. We took account of the findings of the EU Commission’s proceeding in our assessment”.

The proposed merger between Meta and Kustomer was examined by the EU Commission after the case had been referred to it by the Austrian competition authority. Germany had not joined the application for referral to the EU Commission because in the Bundeskartellamt’s general practice a referral requires a merger to be subject to notification under national competition law, which still had to be clarified in the present case.

After the Bundeskartellamt had established in a separate proceeding that the planned acquisition meets the so-called transaction value threshold in German merger control, (see press release of 9 December 2021), the parties to the merger notified the project to the Bundeskartellamt.

In its assessment the Bundeskartellamt took account of the EU Commission’s findings regarding the markets examined by the EU Commission and in its own proceeding concentrated on further aspects.