After more than a year of antitrust investigations, Meta Platforms Inc. was finally allowed to complete its acquisition of customer service software company, Customer.
Meta, which owns Facebook, announced that the deal “complies with all regulatory requirements” in a blog update on Tuesday. Meta first announced the acquisition in November 2020, valued at more than $1 billion, but the company was sued by the Federal Trade Commission. The “illegal monopoly” soon followed, raising questions about whether the Customar acquisition would be approved by regulators.
This was followed by a lengthy review process, which showed Meta could still complete large acquisitions, just not quickly. The company passed an FTC review and a separate approval by antitrust authorities in the UK.
Kustomer builds the software so that businesses can manage customer messages from multiple services on one central dashboard. It’s central to Meta’s plan to make money from its two messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger. Meta expects businesses to use WhatsApp, which has more than 2 billion monthly users, in lieu of other forms of customer communication like email or 1-800 numbers.
WhatsApp has signed deals with commerce partners in international markets such as Indonesia and India, and is also rolling out an option to transfer money within the app, in the hope that users switch to another platform to do business. will not do.
Meta has been subject to intense regulatory scrutiny in recent years. An FTC lawsuit seeks to crack the meta, requiring the company to discontinue its WhatsApp and Instagram purchases. The ongoing litigation has raised concerns that Meta, which has made arguably some of the best acquisitions in tech history, will struggle to secure future deals.
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