Alphabet drops HubSpot acquisition

Alphabet’s plan to acquire HubSpot will not proceed. According to Bloomberg, the acquisition has not reached the due diligence stage.

The two sides have been discussing a possible acquisition of the CRM vendor since April. According to Bloomberg’s sources, Alphabet and HubSpot failed to agree on the details after the investigation. The exact reason for the breakdown in negotiations is not known.

Alphabet has shown great interest in acquiring the CRM vendor since April this year. HubSpot is mainly focused on the SMB segment, and the acquisition would allow the tech giant to compete with other large CRM vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce.

In addition, HubSpot offers automation tools for marketing and advertising campaigns and content distribution for these purposes. In addition, the CRM giant’s solutions support customer service agents in their daily tasks.

Total surprise

Experts were surprised by the breakdown of negotiations. They expected that both sides would already be at the finalization stage and that the exact terms would be set at that point.

If Alphabet were to acquire HubSpot, it would be the largest tech giant acquisition in history, even bigger than its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2011.

More supervision

By the way, any agreement between the two parties would not mean that the takeover could actually take place. Bloomberg further writes that the takeover would be critically examined by competition authorities, especially the American and European ones, to prevent the possible creation of monopolies.

For example, the Biden administration in the US has become much more stringent in recent years regarding acquisitions in the technology sector. Amazon, for example, recently abandoned its acquisition of robot vacuum cleaner specialist iRobot. Microsoft had great difficulty acquiring Activision Blizzard, and Nvidia had to abandon its acquisition of Arm.

HubSpot shares fell 19 percent after Alphabet announced a failed acquisition, its biggest drop since 2020.

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