Here’s another merger that augers badly for two legacy companies
Less than two weeks ago, I noted that the merger between Honda and Nissan was the result of a crisis that neither company was capable of managing, and today we have further proof of that hypothesis in a completely different industry.
Getty Images, the leading supplier of stock images, is apparently exploring a potential merger with its main competitor, Shutterstock. Both are listed on the NYSE as GETY and SSTK respectively.
In the case of Honda and Nissan, we have two traditional carmakers that have been left behind by the EV revolution; with Getty and Shutterstock, we have two stock image companies dealing with the crisis produced by the popularization of generative AI, which is increasingly sidelining their products.
Algorithms such as Dall·E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney or Grok make it increasingly easy to generate images based on simple, written, prompts. Just about the only reason for using a stock image these days is when some kind of historical photo is required, although many are already royalty-free or become so…
