(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. was finally allowed to complete its acquisition of Kustomer, a customer service software company, after more than a year of antitrust scrutiny.
Meta, which owns Facebook, announced that the deal “complied with all regulatory requirements” in a blog update Tuesday. Meta first announced the acquisition, valued at more than $1 billion, in November 2020, but the company was sued by the Federal Trade Commission shortly after for “illegal monopolization,” raising questions about whether the Kustomer acquisition would be approved by regulators.
What followed was a lengthy review process, showing that Meta can still complete big acquisitions, just not quickly. The company passed an FTC review and a separate approval by antitrust authorities in the U.K.
Kustomer builds software so that businesses can manage customer messages from multiple services on one central dashboard. That’s central to Meta’s plan to make money off of its two messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger. Meta hopes businesses will 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 like Indonesia and India, and is also building an option for transferring money within the app in hopes users won’t switch to another platform to conduct business.
Meta has been under intense regulatory scrutiny in recent years. An FTC lawsuit seeks to break up Meta by requiring the company to spin off its WhatsApp and Instagram purchases. The ongoing lawsuit has raised concerns that Meta, which has arguably made some of the best acquisitions in tech history, will struggle to complete future deals.
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