Broadcom first announced plans to acquire VMware for $61 billion in May 2022
Broadcom’s plan to acquire VMware for $61 billion, first announced in May 2022, has encountered another setback. Regulators in both Europe and the U.S. are still looking into the proposed merger and its impact on the evolving cloud market. The UK Competition and Markets Authority, for instance, initiated a stage two probe, which it expects to conclude sometime in late August.
VMware and Broadcom have agreed to extend the outside date — the date the two companies can walk away from the deal — to August 26, 2023. If the deal isn’t closed by then, the pair have the option to extend this date further to November 26, which is nearly a month after the last day of Broadcom’s financial year and the deadline by which Broadcom CEO Hock Tan first suggested the deal would be done.
This is the second time the pair have pushed the outside date back. In February, the date was changed to May 26, following Britain’s competition regulator opening up an investigation into the acquisition in January. At the time, a Broadcom spokesperson told Reuters that it was common for acquisitions of this size to extend their deal deadline.
“We are continuing to make progress with regulatory authorities around the world, and we continue to expect the transaction to close in Broadcom’s fiscal year 2023,” the spokesperson told the news outlet.
With VMware joining Broadcom, 49% of its annual revenue will come from enterprise software, the companies said when first revealing the acquisition in 2022. Further, Tan claimed the acquisition will help Broadcom “reimagine what we can deliver to customers as a leading infrastructure technology company.”
