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- Microsoft confirmed Monday it will buy GitHub for $7.5 billion.
- The news comes after years of talks between the tech giant and developer platform.
- Follow Microsoft’s stock price in real-time here.
Shares of Microsoft rose as much as 1.27% in early trading Monday after the company confirmed it would buy developer-tools platform GitHub for $7.5 billion.
The stock is now up more than 3% since news of a talking between the two companies and the potential acquisition was reported last week by Business Insider. Monday’s announcement concludes multiple years worth of discussions which included a $5 billion price tag for GitHub last year.
“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in a press release. “We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.”
A combination of Microsoft and GitHub would make a lot of sense from a product and customer perspective, and it could provide stability for GitHub, which has found plans to monetize its popular products more challenging than expected and suffered a lot of turnover in its executive ranks.
The 28 million developer platform has been without a CEO since August.
Shares of Microsoft are up 19% since the beginning of 2018.
More on the big Microsoft-GitHub deal:
Read Business Insider’s report on the deal talks on BI Prime.
And BI’s analysis of why a GitHub-Microsoft combination makes sense.
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