Ge Antitrust

Merger and Acquisition

Case 2:

The Eu investigation of the GE Honeywell merger.

Questions :

1) What are the key players and their motivations?

2) What are the antitrust concerns raised by this merger?

Be specific: which type of antitrust issues in which market?

Would your analysis change if you used a broaded definition of the market? A narrower definition?

3) What are the reasons for the US-EU discrepancy?

1) What are the key players and their motivations?

There are some key players whose take part to this merger, the focus will be on the current players but we will present two other players which take a specific and important position according to this merger.

The regulator: EU commission

One of the most important players is the EU regulator, it is the one which has to look if the merger will represent antitrust issues and if it must be good to allow the merger or not. The name of its main force is: Mario Monti (the European commissioner). Of course he is here to discuss with other key players about potentials issues of the merger but he was not the one who studied and decides if there was a danger on this merger. In fact he was just a part of the antitrust process of the EU commission.

Part of the competition commission implied:

Merger task Force:

This part of the competition commission had just one motivation linked with its role, funding if the effects of the merger was potential threat to the competitive market. For them, the thing was just to define market and doing a calculation of market share. And after, they had to analyze if this position could have a bad or a benefic impact on competition inside this specific market. They didn’t had specific motivation in this case other than the fact of doing their daily job.

Competition commissioner (Mario Monti):

His motivations are kind of different as usual. Normally he is here to protect free competition and prevent excessive concentrations of market power and he is the...