Brussels, 09/03/2015 (Agence Europe) - The European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, has warned that mergers in the telecoms sector must not jeopardise affordable prices to consumers.
“I have one interest and that is to make sure that European consumers - that being citizens or businesses - can enjoy relatively innovative markets at affordable prices”, she explained in an interview with the Financial Times, published on Sunday 8 March. A number of operations are being examined, such as the acquisition of Jazztel by Orange in Spain (deadline: 30 April 2015), and the merger between Telenor and TeliaSonera on the Danish market (notified in late February of this year).
During the election campaign which took him to the Presidency of the European Commission, Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Juncker called for a revision of the competition rules applicable to the telecom sector in order to make the European market more dynamic and competitive and to allow businesses to increase in size more easily, an approach suggested by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called for a balance between power on the market and competition so that European businesses can “score points at international level”. When asked whether consolidation had fostered investment in infrastructure, Vestager replied that she had seen “a number of examples of the opposite”. “So far it seems as if it is still competition that will lead to investment, and not the other way round”, she said. She went on to note that the American market offers consumers very little choice and higher prices than Europe in general. (Elodie Lamer)