Brussels, 13 November 2023
The European Commission has waived, under the EU Merger Regulation, the commitments made by Meta to obtain clearance of its acquisition of Kustomer.
The Commission approved the transaction, subject to conditions, in January 2022. The waiver concerns Meta’s obligations: (i) to maintain access to its publicly available business-to-consumer messaging application programming interfaces (‘APIs’), and (ii) to ensure the functional parity of core API functionalities available to Kustomer.
Upon receipt of Meta’s request to waive the commitments on 19 September 2023, the Commission investigated whether a waiver is justified in light of the spinout of Kustomer completed on 15 May 2023. Meta, which owned 100% of Kustomer, divested from Kustomer and retained only a minority non-controlling stake.
The Commission’s investigation revealed that the spinout removes Meta’s economic incentives to foreclose Kustomer’s rivals in the customer service Customer Relationship Management market. The expected gains for Meta from such a foreclosure strategy after the spinout would be significantly reduced compared to expected gains in a scenario where Meta would have retained sole control of Kustomer.
On this basis, the Commission has decided to approve Meta’s waiver request.
More information is available on the Commission’s competition website, in the public case register under the case number M.10262.
Source – EU Commission