US President Donald Trump on Sunday raised potential antitrust concerns around Netflix Inc’s planned US$72 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery Inc, saying that the market share of the combined entity might pose problems.
Trump’s comments, made as he arrived at the Kennedy Center in New York for an event, might spur concerns regulators would oppose the coupling of the world’s dominant streaming service with a Hollywood icon.
The company faces a lengthy US Department of Justice review of a deal that would reshape the entertainment industry.
Photo: Getty Images via AFP
“Well, that’s got to go through a process, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump said when asked about the deal, confirming he met Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently.
“But it is a big market share. It could be a problem,” he added.
Bets on prediction marketplace Polymarket showed a 23 percent chance of Netflix closing the acquisition by the end of next year, down from about 60 percent just before Trump’s comments.
The transaction would combine the world’s No. 1 streaming player with HBO Max. The justice department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal, because the combined market share would put Netflix well above the 30 percent threshold.
Netflix has “a very big market share, and when they have Warner Brothers, you know, that share goes up a lot,” Trump said, adding that he would be personally involved in the decisionmaking process.
Sarandos met with Trump at the White House recently to lobby for the acquisition, Bloomberg reported earlier.
Netflix was not any kind of all-powerful monopoly, and had suffered its own subscriber losses a couple of years earlier, Sarandos said at the time, according to people familiar with the matter.
US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.
EU regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with British House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.
Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it would ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc’s Prime and Walt Disney Co as other major competitors, people familiar with the company’s thinking said.
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