Meta has finally found a willing buyer for Giphy, the animated GIF search engine it acquired for $400 million three years ago.

Shutterstock announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Meta to buy Giphy in a transaction that “consists of $53 million of net cash paid at closing,”  meaning Facebook’s parent company has recuperated just 13% of its money. Shutterstock said it expects the deal to close next month, with Meta also signing a commercial agreement to continue accessing Giphy’s content across its product suite.

The announcement comes some seven months after the U.K.’s antitrust authority issued a final order for Meta to sell Giphy, on the grounds that the merger reduced dynamic competition. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had originally ordered the sale way back in November, 2021, but the appeals process held things up for the better part of another year.

In October last year, Meta confirmed it would drop any further appeals and reluctantly agreed to offload Giphy, but the formal divestment process didn’t start until the CMA issued its final order in January this year, which gave Meta a set period of time to sell its asset — TechCrunch is told that this was likely a six-month window, which meant that the clock was ticking for Meta to conclude a deal.

Conditions of the sale meant that Meta had to sell Giphy as a whole entity, rather than sell it off in pieces, and it had to find a legitimate buyer — a company that would keep Giphy going as a GIF search engine.

Timing

The Meta / Giphy acquisition had been catapulted into the limelight again recently, after the CMA confirmed it was blocking Microsoft’s megabucks Activision acquisition at the end of April, a decision that became even more prominent after the U.K.’s European counterpart in Brussels greenlighted the deal three weeks later.

It’s clear that the U.K. has adopted a tougher antitrust stance of late, and while Microsoft’s $68.7 billion bid for Activision is an entirely different kettle of fish — one that likely will have more twists and turns as the case winds its way through the various appeals processes — it does seem like the U.K. is trying to make up for lost time after countless Big Tech acquisitions were ushered through the regulatory approval process more or less without question.