Kroger-Albertsons Merger Blocked by Court, Handing Victory to Biden Antitrust Enforcers: Judge sides with FTC, which argued that supermarket deal would have eliminated competition and left shoppers vulnerable to higher prices by Dave Michaels and Patrick Thomas. All articles linked here are from The WSJ.
The judge ruled that it would hurt competition too much. The companies wanted to merge so they could compete better against big chains like Walmart and Amazon.Kroger has 9% of the "pureplay" market and Albertsons has 5%. Walmart has more sales than either.
"The deal with Albertsons would have nearly doubled Kroger’s total store count, exceeding the scale of Walmart’s 3,500 supercenters. Rodney McMullen, Kroger’s longtime chief executive, had pledged to eventually invest $1 billion annually in lowering prices at the acquired Albertsons stores, where he said prices typically run 10% to 12% above a Kroger store."
"Kroger and Albertsons proposed to preserve competition by selling hundreds of stores to C&S Wholesale Grocers. The FTC’s attorneys raised doubts about whether C&S, a distributor that operates 23 stores of its own, would be successful in operating nearly 600 more in Washington, Oregon, California and elsewhere."
The judge said "said C&S wouldn’t have enough scale to compete with an enlarged Kroger, and that C&S’s history of unsuccessful grocery store ventures also suggested it isn’t an adequate competitor."
Danish brewer Carlsberg bought Britvic to "develop its Nordic bottling business and strengthen its presence in Western Europe."
French Regulator Fines Appliance Groups $633 Million Over Alleged Price Fixing: Home-appliance manufacturers LG, Miele, Smeg, Electrolux, SEB and Whirlpool were among those fined by Edith Hancock and Dominic Chopping.
The fine is "over concerns they fixed prices on retail products to weather competition from e-commerce platforms."
"ten manufacturers forged individual agreements with their retail distributors to artificially keep sales prices high in a bid to stave off competition from the fast-evolving e-commerce sector."
EU Approves Nvidia’s Run:ai Takeover: The Commission cleared the deal without conditions, saying it didn’t raise competition concerns by Edith Hancock.
Run:ai is a streamlining provider.
"The EU regulator said it looked into whether the deal would have an impact on the supply of so-called discrete GPUs used in datacentres; and the market for GPU orchestration software. It said that Run:ai does not currently have a significant position in orchestration software. Customers can still have access to the company’s competitors that provide similar services, it said, or could build their own software in-house."
"For Swisscom, the deal creates in Italy a converged operator—a telecom provider that offers an integrated blend of services—that it believes will allow it exploit growth opportunities there.
Meanwhile, for the indebted Vodafone, the expected upfront cash payment will help reduce its debt."
Taiwan Blocks Uber’s $950 Million Takeover of Local Foodpanda Business: Uber had aimed to close the deal in the first half of 2025 by Kimberley Kao.
"Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission said Wednesday that competition pressure on Uber’s food-delivery unit in Taiwan stems mainly from Foodpanda, and that eliminating that dynamic would incentivize Uber to raise prices for consumers and eateries on its platform."
"The merger would also make it more difficult for other potential competitors to enter the market, the FTC said."
IBM’s Planned $6.4 Billion HashiCorp Takeover Faces U.K. Antitrust Scrutiny: The initial review comes as the cloud sector is under increased scrutiny from competition regulators by Michael Susin and Edith Hancock.
"IBM said in April that it agreed to buy HashiCorp, extending the tech company’s push into cloud and artificial intelligence as those offerings drive growth. San Francisco-based HashiCorp makes tools and products that help its customers set up cloud infrastructure."
U.S. Expands RealPage Price-Fixing Lawsuit to Include Six Big Landlords: Greystar, the largest U.S. apartment owner, and Blackstone’s LivCor are among the firms added to the suit by Rebecca Picciotto.
"These apartment owners used RealPage’s rent-pricing algorithm to artificially inflate rents nationwide, the Justice Department alleged in an amended civil complaint filed on Tuesday.
The department alleged that the firms conducted phone and email “call arounds” and participated in “user groups” hosted by RealPage to gather confidential rental data from each other, according to the complaint."
"the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high,” said Doha Mekki, the Justice Department’s acting assistant attorney general of antitrust"
"The suit alleged that RealPage stifles competition through its algorithm and maintains an illegal monopoly over rent-setting software.
RealPage has denied the allegations. The company has said that its landlord customers aren’t required to use its price recommendations and that its software can recommend lowering rents."
U.K. Competition Watchdog Prepares to Investigate Tech Giants Under New Rulebook: The regulator has new powers to rein in Big Tech companies by Edith Hancock.
"Under the rules, the CMA can identify technology companies it believes have a “strategic market status,” or SMS, relating to specific type of digital platforms such as app stores, browsers and online advertising.
From there, it can impose strict guard-rails on how those companies run their platforms in the U.K. That can mean banning tech groups from favoring their own products and services over those of rivals or using customers’ data to give themselves an unfair advantage over smaller players."
"Meta Platforms will let some users browse eBay listings on its Facebook Marketplace platform after the EU ruled that the link between its classified-ads service and flagship social network undermined competition."
"The watchdog also ruled that Meta’s terms allow it to leverage advertising data from third parties to its own advantage.
EU officials first started investigating Meta in 2021, eventually penalizing the company in November 2024 for allegedly breaking the bloc’s antitrust rules. Meta resolved a similar antitrust probe in U.K. antitrust authorities in 2023 by offering to change how it uses advertisers’ data."
Related post:
Some recent antitrust news (12-7-2024)
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