Microsoft awaits EU's October ruling on its USD 7.5b acquisition of GitHub

U.S. tech giant Microsoft will not get a final say until Oct. 19 from EU antitrust regulators on its 7.5-billion-U.S. dollar acquisition of the world's largest coding website GitHub, according to an EU merger filing published on Monday.

The filing, which was originally made on Sept. 14 but made public on the European Commission website Monday, makes a request for approval from the EU competition regulators, who will either clear Microsoft's deal or activate a more detailed probe into the merger case on the provisional EU-set deadline of Oct. 19.

Microsoft announced in June its plans to acquire GitHub for 7.5 billion dollars, the largest commercial takeover by Microsoft since 2016 when it bought LinkedIn for 26 billion dollars. The deal is due to close by the end of this year.

As the world top code-hosting website, GitHub claims more than 28 million developers and 85 million repositories on its platform. It is said to be used by more than half of the Fortune 50 companies.

The ambitious merger attempt by Microsoft aims to boost the company's strong position against its rival Amazon in cloud computing business. Microsoft has announced that it is expected to open its first cloud centers in Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates by 2019.