RBC Capital says antitrust concerns make Google acquisition of HubSpot unlikely

Commenting on Reuters’ article on Google’s (GOOGL) interest on acquiring HubSpot (HUBS) RBC Capital says that on paper, the firm understands the strategic rationale for a potential acquisition as Alphabet would have the ability to bundle GCP, Google Workspace, and HubSpot together and be more competitive against AWS (AMZN) and Azure (MSFT). In addition, this could drive GCP growth, starting with the fact that HubSpot is almost entirely hosted on AWS. However, RBC says “antitrust concerns make the deal unlikely.” Even if the deal makes strategic sense for Google, the firm believes there would be too much antitrust scrutiny for the deal to actually go through. RBC notes that if regulators were going to stop Adobe (ADBE) from buying Figma, then it thinks it would be difficult for Google to make an acquisition of this size. The firm has an Outperform rating on HubSpot with a price target of $700.