David Wadhwani, senior vice president of digital media for Adobe, speaks during the launch of Adobe Creative Cloud and CS6 in San Francisco, April 23, 2012.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Adobe and Figma, the cloud-based design tool, will terminate their planned $20 billion merger in light of regulatory hurdles, the companies said Monday.
In a statement, the two companies said “there is no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.”
The news is a sudden pivot from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen’s latest talking points, as he told CNBC Wednesday that the company believes in the acquisition and its benefits for consumers.
“We want to take the ability for what Figma has done with respect to creative collaborative software on the web, combine that with what Adobe has done in our creative, and make it even more accessible for others,” Narayen told CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “We think it’s an adjacency, we really believe in our merits of the case, but the regulatory environment is challenging.”
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
