%20(1).png)
%20(1).png)
Adobe's $20 billion (almost Rs. 1,65,550 crore) purchase for cloud-based designer platform Figma might decrease competition and lock out rivals in worldwide marketplaces for interactive product design tools, EU antitrust officials said on Monday.
The European Commission announced last month that it had launched a full-scale inquiry into the agreement after a preliminary examination raised concerns.
Tech transactions have recently garnered intense antitrust regulatory attention amid concerns that larger corporations may be purchasing competing start-ups in order to shut them down.
Figma's web-based collaborative design and brainstorming tool is popular with internet businesses such as Zoom Video Communications, Airbnb, and Coinbase.
According to the EU antitrust authority, the merger would eliminate a key rival and potentially allow Photoshop manufacturer Adobe to limit competition in worldwide markets for the provision of interactive product design tools.
It further stated that by integrating Figma with Adobe's Creative Cloud suite, the purchase might impair Figma's ability for expansion into an effective rival to Adobe's asset creation tools and effectively decrease competition in interactive product design tools.
"With our comprehensive investigation, we hope to ensure that users continue to have access to a diverse range of digital creative tools," said European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager in a statement.
Customers throughout the world have been extremely happy about the transaction, according to Adobe.
"We remain confident in the merits of the case because Figma's product design is an adjacency to Adobe's core creative products and Adobe has no meaningful plans to compete in the product design space," said the business in a statement.
"We are looking forward to establishing these facts in the next phase of the process and successfully completing the transaction."
The EU's competition enforcer said it will decide whether to allow or ban the agreement by December 14.
