Brussels, 09/06/2004 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission has decided to refer the examination of the planned acquisition of the ish GmbH & Co. KG and ish KS NRW GmbH & Co. KG, the operator of the North Rhine-Westphalian regional broadband cable network, to the German competition authority. In view of concerns that the acquisition may strengthen the dominant position of KDG, in compliance with Article 9 of the regulation on European mergers, the Federal Cartel Office submitted to the Commission a request for referral on 14 May 2004.
KDG operates the former broadband cable network of Deutsche Telekom AG in all of Germany except in Bundesländer Hessen and North Rhine-Westphalia where ish is the largest broadband operator and those in Baden-Wuerttemberg where KDG had been planning to set up. KDG had previously notified the German Federal Cartel Office of its plans and its intention to buy out the regional operators iesy Hessen and Kabel Baden-Württemberg. The Commission does not have competency for these two operations and considers that they should therefore be examined uniformly by a single competition authority. The combination of the KDG and ish networks, which will increase the scope of broadcast signals, has raised concerns among the German authorities about competition on the market for feeding-in broadcast signals. Similarly, following the disappearance of ish, competition could also decline on the market for services for digital pay-TV, the market for delivery of signals from the regional broadband cable to the in-house cable systems and the market for the supply of signals to end-users.