After several months of investigation, Brussels decided and finally validated, unconditionally, the takeover of the virtual assistant specialist Nuance by Microsoft.
Tuesday afternoon, the European Commission officially gave the green light for the operation, concluded between the two American companies for an amount estimated at 19.7 billion dollars, or 17.5 billion euros. The takeover was conditional on an investigation by Brussels, which feared that the acquisition would create a concentration of the transcription software market and harm competition in Europe.
The second biggest takeover in Microsoft’s history, after LinkedIn
On April 12, Microsoft cracked a press release announcing with great fanfare the acquisition of Nuance, for nearly $ 20 billion. The operation, corresponding to the second largest takeover of the firm at the window since that of LinkedIn in 2016 ($ 27 billion), will allow Microsoft to develop artificial intelligence solutions that will be intended for healthcare workers.
Nuance, a company specializing in transcription software and customer engagement solutions in the healthcare and enterprise sector, has a division that offers AI-boosted speech recognition solutions and helps physicians better manage certain tasks. administrative. In addition, it provides voice identification, biometric recognition for customer service and digital identification. What inevitably inspire Microsoft.
The whole question of this takeover, in the eyes of the European Commission, was whether the acquisition was likely to significantly reduce competition in the business software markets, in the Cloud market (for Azure) and in the communication services in companies (for Microsoft Teams), but also on those of productivity software and PC operating systems.
For Brussels, Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance will not harm competition
The European Commission has combed through the various activities and potential links between the two companies. For example, it ensured that there were no horizontal overlaps between Nuance’s activities and those of Microsoft in the software and transcription markets. And finally, she found that the two entities offered very different products. Indeed, Nuance delivers out-of-the-box solutions to users, and Microsoft, application programming interfaces that developers can then use to integrate speech recognition into their programs.
Regarding a possible vertical link between Microsoft’s cloud arm, Azure, and Nuance’s downstream healthcare transcription software, Brussels, once again, did not detect any mutual dependence between the two companies. As for the use of data transcribed with Nuance software, the Commission believes that having access to this data does not benefit Microsoft and will not push the giant to rule out competing healthcare software providers, since this data is supposed to be be stored by third parties.
Finally, the most critical point is undoubtedly that of possible conglomerate links between Microsoft products and the Nuance transcription software. Here, Brussels concluded that the company resulting from the takeover would not have the capacity to disrupt the various markets in which Nuance and Microsoft operate. Competition is preserved, even on the operating system side, since Windows is the only one for which Nuance’s transcription software is available.
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Source: press release
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