Brussels, 27/01/2011 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 26 January, the European Commission gave its conditional authorisation to the purchase, for $7.68 billion, of the American developer of IT security solutions, McAfee, by the Intel group, which is also American and the world's largest producer of semiconductors. It agreed to the commitments put forward by Intel to resolve the problems of competition raised by the operation.
More specifically, the Commission was concerned that the entity created by the merger would use its own security solutions in its chips and chipsets, making them incompatible with rival systems. Given Intel's strong presence on the world microprocessor market, this would have had the effect of excluding rival security systems from the market. It was also concerned at the possible consequences for Intel's competitors of a lack of compatibility between McAfee solutions and chips made by producers other than Intel.
In view of these concerns, Intel has committed: - to ensure that vendors of rival security systems will have access to all necessary information to use functionalities of Intel's central processing units and chipsets, thereby putting them on the same footing as McAfee; - not to prevent competitors' security systems from running on Intel units and chipsets; - not to hamper the operation of McAfee's security solutions when running on personal computers containing rival processors or chipsets. These commitments satisfied the Commission, which worked with the American Federal Trade Commission to examine this case, which was notified on 29 November last year. (F.G./transl.fl)