An investigation by the Commission has found that if the acquisition goes through, the merged entity’s market position would ‘remain moderate’.
The EU has approved Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) $14bn bid to acquire Juniper Networks after finding no competition concerns in an investigation.
In an announcement today (1 August), the European Commission found that HPE acquiring Juniper will “not significantly reduce competition” in network technology product markets.
Based in Sunnyvale, California, Juniper develops networking technology products such as routers, switches and network management and security software.
The company has been betting big on AI in recent years, and CEO Rami Rahim said in January – when the acquisition was first announced – that revenue from Juniper products that leverage AI had grown nearly 100pc year-over-year for the previous two quarters.
HPE, which resulted from a split in Hewlett Packard that separated its consumer and enterprise businesses, has been growing rapidly and making acquisitions across many segments of its business. The company said recently that acquiring Juniper is a way to “supercharge” its offerings in AI-native networking.
Now, the EU has found that if the acquisition goes through, the merged entity’s market position would “remain moderate” in the wireless local area network (WLAN) equipment, the wireless access points (WAPs) and the Ethernet campus switches markets.
It argues that the merged entity would continue to face competition from a wide range of competitors, including strong and established players in each of the markets.
“Customers have a certain level of countervailing buyer power, allowing them to react in case of price increases of WLAN equipment and Ethernet campus switches,” the Commission wrote.
The deal was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in January, leading to a surge in Juniper’s share price. Once the deal is closed, Rahim will lead the combined HPE networking business and report directly to HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri.
HPE’s bid is currently under investigation in the UK, where the country’s Competition and Markets Authority is investigating whether the merger could lead to a “substantial lessening of competition” in the domestic market.
Last October, HPE created 150 jobs at a new hybrid cloud R&D centre in Galway. Earlier this year, HPE’s managing director of Ireland, Ray McGann, spoke on The Leaders’ Room podcast to share his thoughts on leadership in the technology sector, with a focus on AI and on the EU’s recently passed AI Act.
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