- Satya Nadella has orchestrated a slew of acquisitions at Microsoft since becoming CEO in 2014.
- He laid out his criteria for possible acquisitions at Axel Springer's annual award ceremony Tuesday.
Satya Nadella has closed a number of deals for Microsoft in his tenure as CEO, and he says there are two key factors he considers when eyeing possible acquisitions.
Nadella discussed his thought process for acquisitions while speaking at the Axel Springer Award ceremony in Berlin on Tuesday. Axel Springer is Insider's parent company.
"To me there are a couple of criteria," Nadella said. "First thing is, is this something that Microsoft can add real value to? If you take LinkedIn or GitHub or Activision or Mojang or what have you, they all have to make sense that Microsoft has some unique contribution that we can make both because of our technology, our brand, our go-to-market to the asset. Otherwise, why do it? And then of course at the end of the day, it has to make financial sense as well."
After clearing hurdles with antitrust regulators, Microsoft has closed its $69 billion deal with Activision Blizzard, the video games publisher behind blockbusters like "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft." Microsoft also bought Minecraft creator Mojang Studios for $2.5 billion in November 2014.
Nadella has spoken before about the importance of gaming to Microsoft's future.
"As a large company, I think it's critical to define the core, but it's important to make smart choices on other businesses in which we can have fundamental impact and success," he wrote in a memo to employees a few months after he became CEO in 2014. "The single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent, in a mobile-first world is gaming."
With Nadella at the helm, Microsoft also bought professional networking site LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 and code hosting platform GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018. Microsoft has also invested $13 billion into OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.