Meta has finally found a willing buyer for Giphy, the animated GIF search engine it bought for $400 million three years ago.
Shutterstock announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Meta to purchase Giphy in a transaction that “consists of $53 million in net cash paid at closing,” including working capital. The company said it expects the deal to close next month, with Meta also signing a commercial agreement to continue accessing Giphy’s content in its suite of products.
The news comes about seven months after Britain’s antitrust authority issued Meta a final injunction to sell Giphy, on the grounds that the merger reduced dynamic competition. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had originally ordered the sale as far back as November 2021, but the appeals process held things back for much of a year.
Last October, Meta confirmed it would drop all further appeals and reluctantly agreed to divest Giphy, but the formal divestment process did not officially begin until the CMA gave his final order in January of this year, which gave Meta a period of time to sell its assets – todaybusinessupdates.com was told this was likely a six-month window, meaning the clock was ticking for Facebook’s parent company to close a deal .
The terms of the sale meant that Meta had to sell Giphy as a whole, rather than selling it in pieces, and that it had to find a legitimate buyer – a company that would keep Giphy going as a GIF search engine.
