Broadcom completes VMware acquisition on Wednesday after Chinese regulator approval

Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware on Wednesday. The company does this after receiving conditional approval from the Chinese market regulator. The acquisition involves an amount of 61 billion dollars.

Broadcom and VMware confirm that they want to complete the acquisition of VMware on November 22. The two companies, after approval from the Chinese regulator, now have ‘all necessary permissions’ from authorities. The company previously received approval for the takeover in the European Union, the United Kingdom and several other countries. There are also “no legal obstacles” in the United States to concluding the agreement under American takeover regulations, the companies say.

The Chinese government’s approval was the final obstacle to the Broadcom-VMware deal. It was previously expected that China would block the takeover due to geopolitical tensions between the country and the United States. Those tensions have eased somewhat after Chinese President Xi Jingping and his American counterpart Joe Biden met in San Francisco last week.

China does impose conditions on the takeover. For example, the VMware server software must work with local hardware. The company should also not prevent VMware from being compatible with Broadcom competitors’ hardware products, China’s market regulator said in a statement. This includes, for example, storage adapters. The EU made a similar demand of Broadcom before the region signed off on the deal.

Broadcom announced last year that it wanted to acquire VMware for $61 billion. This makes it the largest acquisition the company has made to date.