Google/Wiz merger approved by the European Commission

The European Commission has granted unconditional clearance for Google’s acquisition of Wiz following a Phase I investigation.

Frontier Economics advised on the competition assessment of the transaction, providing economic analysis to support Wiz during the Commission’s merger review.

The transaction would add Wiz’s cloud security solutions – designed to help organisations identify and address cybersecurity risks across cloud environments – to Google’s existing suite of cloud services.

As Google’s existing cloud security capabilities are mostly reactive and focussed on customers of their cloud infrastructure, adding Wiz’s proactive cloud security solutions would add further protection against security threats across different cloud environments. 

This will accelerate improvements in cloud security and support the growing adoption of multi-cloud strategies, helping customers to deploy and manage workloads securely across different cloud providers.

As part of its assessment, the Commission examined the impact of the transaction on competition in relation to the cloud security industry and market for cloud infrastructure. It considered whether customers would continue to have access to credible alternatives if Wiz’s platform were more closely integrated with Google’s existing products or if it no longer worked effectively with other cloud environments.

The Commission also examined whether the transaction would result in Google obtaining access to commercially sensitive information relating to competing cloud service providers. It found that customers would retain several credible alternatives and the ability to switch providers, and confirmed that the data accessible to Google as a result of the transaction is not commercially sensitive and is generally available to other security software providers.

On this basis, the Commission concluded that the transaction would not raise competition concerns and cleared it unconditionally following its Phase I review.

Frontier Economics regularly advises clients on competition matters. For more information please contact media@frontier-economics.com, or call +44 (0)20 7031 7000.