Trump’s antitrust police officers only signal that big American merges won’t get a free passage
The new Trump administration in her second week has given an early sign that US companies will not get a free passage when it comes to large mergers and acquisitions.
It came on Thursday when Antitrust’s police officers Donald Trump at the Ministry of Justice filed a lawsuit in search of blocking Hewlett Packard (Hpe) from the acquisition of rival juniper networks (Jnpr).
“I think it is for those who thought the new administration would be soft to antitrust’s or soft on merger, think again,” Yahoo Finance Alden Abbott told Yahoo Finance, a senior research associate Mercatus Center -A, former main adviser to the Federal Commission for Trade.
The impression claimed that $ 14 billion in connecting the second and third largest wireless provisions of the company in the country would significantly reduce the competition in the market.
“An acquisition, if consumed, would result in two companies – a leader in the Cisco market (Csco) and HP-controlling more than 70% of the US market and eliminate the fierce head competition to the head, “said the impression in his answer.
Since the third quarter of 2024, Cisco has controlled almost 42% of the market For wireless networks of local areas or WLANs, which include hardware and software for wireless connection devices within areas such as office and school campus.
Hewlett Packard and Juniper have betrayed a common statement It called the legal analysis of the impression “basically flawed.” The combination of companies, they said, will be competitive, improve innovation and give customers more choices on the network market.
Mark McCareinsClinical professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and former antitrust litigation, expects Trump to adhere to the more traditional, well -tested legal theories used by those used by Administrative Biden.
“I think this administration is more concerned about the victory,” he said, “they do not want to take cases where they lose because they have precious resources and send a bad message if it is a loss of resource.”
Investors partly cheered Trump’s elections because they hoped that would mark the end of the aggressive era implementation of antitrusts, which contained federal conflicts with some American corporate giants.
But Trump has already dropped several hints For his approach to M&A approval to be aggressive, especially when it comes to technological giants.
“Big Tech has been wild for years,” Trump said in a statement of his social platform of the truth, which announced his choice of Gail Slater to run the impression of -an antitrust division.
