Review of the Guidelines on the assessment of horizontal mergers under the Council Regulation on the control of concentrations between undertakings and of the Guidelines on the assessment of non-ho...

CALL FOR EVIDENCE Ref. Ares(2025)3736625 - 08/05/2025 FOR AN EVALUATION AND IMPACT ASSESSMENT RUN IN PARALLEL TITLE OF THE INITIATIVE Merger guidelines – review LEAD DG – RESPONSIBLE UNIT DG COMP – Unit A.2 – HT.100356 LIKELY TYPE OF INITIATIVE Guidelines INDICATIVE PLANNING Q4 2027 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/review-merger-guidelines_en A. Political context, evaluation, problem definition & subsidiarity check Political context Rigorous and effective merger enforcement in accordance with clear and predictable rules protects fair competition and incentivises companies to innovate and become more efficient. At the same time, in the global race to develop deep technologies and breakthrough innovations, competition policy must keep pace with evolving markets and tech innovation. This needs a fresh approach better geared to common goals and allowing companies to scale up in global markets, while always ensuring a level playing field in the Single Market. The Mission Letter to Executive Vice-President (‘EVP’) Ribera and the Commission’s Competitiveness Compass and Clean Industrial Deal provide a mandate to review the Horizontal Merger Guidelines. The aim is to establish a modern framework that systematically addresses recent economic realities and places appropriate weight on resilience, efficiency and innovation, time horizons, investment intensity of competition in certain strategic sectors, and the changed defence...