LNKD Linkedin Corp. Class A

By Natalia Drozdiak 

BRUSSELS -- The European Union on Tuesday approved Microsoft's $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn Corp., after the software giant agreed to safeguards to assuage antitrust concerns.

The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, said it was clearing the deal on the condition that, postmerger, Microsoft allowed other professional networking sites access to programming commands for its Office applications and cloud-computing services for the next five years. It must also grant computer manufacturers the option not to install the LinkedIn shortcut on desktop devices, the EU said.

"A growing number of Europeans subscribe to professional social networks. Today's decision ensures that Europeans will continue to enjoy a freedom of choice between professional social networks," said EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager.

Microsoft announced its deal with LinkedIn in June.

The concessions are mild. Microsoft already offers its Office Add-in program to professional social-networking services. Giving rivals access to its cloud-computing system could ultimately benefit Microsoft, because companies that took advantage of that system would use Microsoft products to do so. Moreover, LinkedIn has become the dominant professional social network without help from Microsoft's desktop, counting 467 million members in its most recent quarter, up 18% from a year earlier.

"The quote-unquote concessions are minimal and very much in line with the openness that Microsoft has been pursuing in the last few years," said Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Brad Reback.

The EU's approval strikes a blow to Salesforce.com Inc., which lost out to Microsoft in the bidding for LinkedIn. It argued that Microsoft would gain an unfair advantage over competitors through its access to LinkedIn's vast pool of data.

Salesforce in a statement encouraged regulators to be "vigilant" as they monitor Microsoft's use of LinkedIn.

"As AI [artificial intelligence], machine learning and other technologies continue to advance, questions around access to critical data sets will only become more important and Salesforce will continue to share its views with regulators and policy makers around the world about the ways in which access to data is emerging as a key issue in competition policy," said Salesforce's chief legal officer Burke Norton.

However, the EU said it was unlikely the deal would allow Microsoft to shut competitors such as Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP out of the customer-relationship-management market. It ruled that access to the full LinkedIn database was inessential to compete in the market.

"We've now obtained all the regulatory approvals needed to complete the acquisition and the deal will close in the coming days," Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said in a blog post.

To win EU approval, Microsoft also agreed to permit rival social networks to access Office's application programming interfaces, which allow discrete programs to communicate with each another.

Among other things, the measures proposed by Microsoft would allow for the display of profiles from sites other than LinkedIn in a calendar entry of a meeting.

Moreover, the EU said Microsoft must allow rival networks access to Microsoft Graph, a collection of software used to build applications that can tap data in the Microsoft cloud. Developers already have access to the software, a person familiar with the matter said.

Write to Natalia Drozdiak at natalia.drozdiak@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 06, 2016 14:14 ET (19:14 GMT)

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