LONDON: Facebook has made a case for not selling Giphy in a strongly worded letter to a British regulator and questioned the watchdog’s recent call to divest the GIF website over competition concerns.
Facebook argued that “the inability of the CMA (the UK Competition and Markets Authority) to issue any order against Giphy raises serious questions as to the enforceability of any divestment order and whether any such order could be effective,” in its letter that CMA published online on Wednesday.
The CMA last month hinted that Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, might need to sell Giphy based on its preliminary findings that the deal would hurt the display advertising market and other social media networks.
Facebook bought Giphy, a website for making and sharing animated images, or GIFs, last year to integrate it with its photo-sharing app, Instagram. The deal, pegged at $400 million by news website Axios, was being probed by the CMA since January.
Facebook in its letter said the CMA’s provisional findings had “fundamental errors,” and the British regulator had failed to provide alternative remedies that would have been “far less intrusive and equally effective” for it to clear the deal.
California-based Facebook declined to comment further and the CMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Facebook questions British watchdog’s authority to order Giphy sale
https://arab.news/5jh44
Facebook questions British watchdog’s authority to order Giphy sale
- Facebook has made a case for not selling Giphy and questioned the watchdog’s recent call to divest the GIF website over competition concern
Semafor targets Gulf expansion after first profitable year
- Digital news brand generates $2m in earnings on $40m of revenue in 2025, and raises $30m in new financing
- Platform aims to be the ‘business and financial news brand of record for the Gulf,’ CEO says, and to ‘blanket the world’ within 2 years
DUBAI: Digital news platform Semafor generated $2 million in earnings in 2025 before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, on revenue of $40 million, marking its first year of profitability.
It also closed $30 million in new financing, which it plans to use to grow its editorial operations and live events business.
These achievements are particularly notable at a time when the global news industry is facing declining revenues and the erosion of audience trust, the company said.
Justin B. Smith, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Arab News that Semafor’s model and approach is distinguished by several factors, which can be encapsulated by its vision of building a news product to “serve consumers that are increasingly not trusting news, but also designed with a business model that could deliver sustainable economic advantage.”
Following its first profitable year and armed with new funding, Semafor, founded in 2022, now plans an accelerated phase of global expansion with a focus on scaling editorial output and global convenings.
The company said it will broaden its publication schedule in the year ahead. Semafor Gulf and Semafor Business will become daily publications as the platform increases the frequency of its “first-read” services, which are daily briefings designed to showcase “front page” news and intended to serve as the “first read” for audiences, Smith said.
The Gulf edition of Semafor launched in September 2024, with former Dow Jones reporter Mohammed Sergie as editor. In 2025 Matthew Martin was appointed its Saudi Arabia bureau chief.
Semafor’s brand slogan is “intelligence for the new world economy” and “the Gulf is the epicenter of the new world economy,” Smith said. Currently, its Gulf operation employs eight journalists, based in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and as it moves to a daily publishing schedule it plans to significantly bolster its editorial team, both in existing markets and new ones, such as Qatar.
Semafor is “obsessed with the business, financial and economic story” in the region and aims to become “the business and financial news brand of record for the Gulf,” Smith said.
In the US, Semafor DC, currently published daily, will move to a twice-a-day format in March. In addition, the company’s flagship annual Semafor World Economy platform in Washington will expand this year from a three-day event to five days, with extended programming. The event, in April, is expected to attract more than 400 global CEOs, more than double the number that took part in 2025.
In addition to the US and the Gulf, Semafor currently operates in Africa. It held its first event in the Gulf region last month, during Abu Dhabi Finance Week, and said it is now looking to grow its events footprint across the Gulf, and into Asia. It will launch a China edition next month, its first foray into Asia, and plans to launch in Europe in 2027, followed eventually by Latin America.
Within the next two years, Semafor aims to have “blanketed the whole world” and become a mature, global intelligence and news brand competing with the “greatest legacy business and financial news brands in the world,” Smith said.
“Our goal is to become the leading global intelligence and news company for the world, founded on independent, high-quality content and convenings,” he added.
