On Tuesday 21 December, the European Commission unconditionally approved the proposed acquisition of Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nuance – active mainly in the United States) – by Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft). The Commission concluded that the transaction would not raise competition concerns within the European Economic Area (EEA).
Nuance is a transcription software company with a strong focus on the healthcare sector and customer engagement solutions. Microsoft is a global technology company that provides business and productivity software and computing.
The Commission found that the transaction would not significantly reduce competition in the transcription software, cloud services, enterprise communication services, customer relationship management, productivity software and PC operating systems markets.
In particular, the Commission found that Microsoft and Nuance offer very different products. While Nuance mainly offers out-of-the-box solutions to end users, Microsoft provides application programming interfaces (APIs) as part of its Azure Cognitive Services application that developers can use to integrate speech recognition technology into their programs. In addition, competing transcription service providers in the healthcare sector do not depend on Microsoft for cloud computing services. More information: https://bit.ly/3EiZ695 (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)