Plans to sell the dailies Aachener Nachrichten and Aachener Zeitung to the publishing house Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft withdrawn

The shareholders of the newspaper publishing house Aachener Verlagsgesellschaft have decided to abandon plans notified to the Bundeskartellamt to sell the two Aachen dailies to Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft.

Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft intended to acquire the majority of the capital and voting rights of Aachener Verlagsgesellschaft mbH. Aachener Verlagsgesellschaft mbH publishes the two newspapers Aachener Nachrichten and Aachener Zeitung. Aachener Verlagsgesellschaft currently holds 75.5% of the shares in the newspaper publishing house Zeitungsverlag Aachen GmbH. The remaining 24.5% of the shares are already indirectly held by Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft.

The 6th Decision Division had informed the parties to the merger in early November 2009 that it intended to prohibit the acquisition. According to the Decision Division, there was a danger that dominant positions in the reader and advertising markets in the distribution area of the two dailies would have been strengthened.

In the view of the Bundeskartellamt, the dominant positions would have been strengthened for the following reasons, each of which would have been sufficient to prohibit the project:

• Potential competition between the Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft and the Aachener Verlagsgesellschaft would have been eliminated across the whole of the distribution area of the two newspapers. The preservation of potential competition is of particular importance in markets with monopolistic structures, such as the markets affected in the present case.

• In the Heinsberg region, actual competition on the reader and advertising market would have been eliminated by the merger and a further concentration of market shares would have occurred. Currently, the Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft and the Aachener Verlagsgesellschaft are direct competitors in this region. In the south of the Aachen district (Monschau, Simmerath, Roetgen) the competitive position of Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft in the advertising market would have been strengthened, inter alia due to its superior financial strength vis-à-vis the advertising publisher Weiss.

In addition, due to its participation in the Dutch publisher of advertising journals “Nederlands Weekbladen Groep” the concentration would have offered Rheinisch Bergische Verlagsgesellschaft the opportunity to close a territorial gap and offer supra-regional customers (e.g. discounters) more advertising space.

Further information will be published shortly on the Bundeskartellamt’s website under the rubric "Merger control – Case summaries”.