Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair at Microsoft says the deal is progressing quickly for an acquisition of this size.
In an interview with the Belgium business website L' Echo , Smith said that Microsoft have received many requests from the governments regarding the deal and have done their best to answer those requests with the requested information.
Additionally, the deal is moving fast ahead and could be done sooner than expected. Smith reiterated that the acquisition is a long process and that Microsoft is still at the stage where they are "answering questions" but they are now coming to the end of the beginning and are getting to the middle of the acquisition process.
One of our lawyers summed it up well by saying, "We are coming to the end of the beginning and now we are starting the beginning of the middle." It is a long process and we are still at the stage where we are answering questions. For us, of course, the sooner it is done, the better, but we will respect the process.
And even though it seems that the deal is moving fast, we still don't expect to see it all wrapped up until early 2023, if all goes according to plan. The deal of this magnitude was always expected to attract attention from regulators so Microsoft probably need to spend more time explaining what is their goal with this acquisition.
If this was a smaller publisher, the deal would probably be finalised by the end of the year but this is Activision, the owners of one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world in Call of Duty so it's not surprising if the deal takes awhile.
