Cleary Gottlieb acted as global antitrust counsel to Broadcom Inc. (Broadcom) in its acquisition of VMware Inc. (VMware).
The cash-and-stock transaction was valued at approximately $87 billion at signing. The deal closed on November 22, 2023.
By bringing together the complementary Broadcom Software portfolio with the leading VMware platform, the combined company will provide enterprise customers an expanded platform of critical infrastructure solutions to accelerate innovation and address the most complex information technology infrastructure needs.
Broadcom is a global technology leader that designs, develops, and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions. Broadcom’s category-leading product portfolio serves critical markets including data center, networking, enterprise software, broadband, wireless, storage, and industrial.
VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. As a trusted foundation to accelerate innovation, VMware software gives businesses the flexibility and choice they need to build the future.
During the 18-month regulatory review process, Broadcom obtained clearances from competition agencies across the globe. The transaction was unconditionally cleared by the US, UK, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, South Africa, and Taiwan. The transaction was conditionally cleared by the European Commission, Korea, and China.
Global competition authorities focused on whether the transaction might result in anticompetitive conglomerate effects if the merged company were able to degrade interoperability between VMware’s server virtualization software and rival hardware components that are used in servers. The combination of important technology markets and new theories of harm made this one of the most analytically challenging cases of the last several years.