The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Canadian Competition Bureau, the UK Competition and Markets Authority, the US Department of Justice and three US Attorneys General’s offices launched a multilateral working group on Tuesday 16 March to analyse the effects of mergers in the pharmaceutical sector.
The working group was initiated by the FTC and is in line with close cooperation between national competition authorities.
Its goal is to identify concrete and actionable steps to update the analysis of pharmaceutical mergers. These measures will bring enhanced scrutiny and more detailed analysis of these kinds of mergers in the future, for the benefit of consumers, says a Commission press release.
Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President of the Commission, welcomed the initiative “to take stock of the lessons learned in recent years and explore new ways to foster vibrant competition to the benefit of citizens”.
The number of mergers in the pharmaceutical sector has increased in recent years and there is the need to scrutinise closely to detect those that could lead to higher medicine prices, lower innovation or anticompetitive conduct, says the Commission. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)