[TOTM: The following is part of a symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. The entire series of posts is available here.
This post is authored by Sharis Pozen (Partner, Clifford Chance; former Vice President of Global Competition Law and Policy, GE; former Acting Assistant Attorney General, DOJ Antitrust Division); with Timothy Cornell (Partner, Clifford Chance); Brian Concklin (Counsel, Clifford Chance); and Michael Van Arsdall (Counsel, Clifford Chance).]
The draft Vertical Merger Guidelines (“Guidelines”) miss a real opportunity to provide businesses with consistent guidance across jurisdictions and to harmonize the international approach to vertical merger review.
As drafted, the Guidelines indicate the agencies will evaluate market shares and concentration — measured using the same methodology described in the long-standing Horizontal Merger Guidelines — but not use these metrics as a “rigid screen.” On that basis the Guidelines establish a “soft” 20 percent threshold, where the U.S. Agencies are “unlikely to challenge a vertical merger” if the merging parties have less than a 20 percent share of the relevant market and the related product is used in less than 20 percent of the relevant market.
We suggest, instead, that the Guidelines be aligned with those of other jurisdictions, namely the EU non-horizontal merger guidelines [for an extended discussion of which, see Bill Kolaasky’s symposium post here —ed.]. The European Commission’s guidelines state the European Commission is “unlikely to find concern” with a vertical merger affecting less than 30 percent of the relevant markets and the post-merger HHIs fall below 2000. Among others, Japan and Chile employ a similarly higher bar than the Guidelines. A discrepancy between the U.S. and other international guidelines causes unnecessary uncertainty within the business and legal communities and could lead to inconsistent enforcement outcomes.In any event, beyond the dangers created by a lack of international harmonization, setting the threshold at 20 percent seems arbitrarily low given the pro-competitive nature of most vertical mergers. Setting the threshold so low fails to recognize the inherently procompetitive nature of the majority of vertical combinations, and could result in false positives, and undue cost and delay.