Meta will sell Giphy for 53 million after buying it for 400 million

Meta abandoned efforts to acquire the company in October last year and agreed to divest Giphy, but its divestment process only started in January this year, when the CMA issued its final order, noting that Meta should sell Giphy as a whole entity and not in parts, as well as finding a buyer to keep it running as a GIF search engine.

According to Tom Smith, a former legal director at the CMA who is now a partner in a London-based law firm, Meta was largely responsible for the deal going wrong, completing the purchase agreement before it got the authorization of the CMA.

This type of conduct is not well regarded by the regulatory authority, Smith said, which can toughen its investigations after executing such dynamics, so a forced sale was a likely result.

“They can complete their merger, but the problem is that if they do complete it, they risk the CMA starting to investigate after the fact and making their life more difficult by forcing them to keep the two companies separate and possibly at the end of it all. that, make him sell the company he just bought,” Smith told TechCrunch.