Adobe Gives Up on its $20 Billion Acquisition of Figma
- Laurent Giret
- Dec 18, 2023
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24
Adobe is officially giving up on its $20 billion acquisition of Figma after the UK CMA provisionally ruled against the deal last month. The acquisition of the popular collaborative design tool was originally announced back in September 2022, and Adobe believed at the time that it could use Figma to “accelerate the delivery of Adobe’s Creative Cloud technologies on the web.”
“Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” said Shantanu Narayen, chair and CEO, Adobe. “While Adobe and Figma shared a vision to jointly redefine the future of creativity and productivity, we continue to be well positioned to capitalize on our massive market opportunity and mission to change the world through personalized digital experiences.”
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As we’ve seen previously with Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the Redmond giant had to make a lot of concessions to get the UK CMA to finally approve the deal. Adobe’s acquisition of Figma was also being investigated by the EU Commission, and Margrethe Vestager, the Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy also suggested today that Adobe was facing a difficult fight with regulators.
“Figma is the clear market leader in interactive product design software and Adobe in vector and raster editing tools with its Illustrator and Photoshop software. By combining these two companies, the proposed acquisition would have terminated all current and prevented all future competition between them. Our in-depth investigation showed that this would lead to higher prices, reduced quality or less choice for customers,” Vestager explained today.
Due to Adobe not moving forward with the acquisition, the company will need to pay Figma a $1 billion termination fee in cash. In a separate announcement, Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of Figma said that the company will be leveraging AI technology to “make it easy for anyone to design and build digital products on a single multiplayer canvas—from start to finish, idea to production.”