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The European champion would still be ten times smaller than the Chinese but would have factual monopoly in Europe. I don’t think blocking the merger was entirel
by adrianN 1y ago
The European champion would still be ten times smaller than the Chinese but would have factual monopoly in Europe. I don’t think blocking the merger was entirely unreasonable.
- IAmBroom 1y agoEuro/North American, but still smaller than China's company. Your second sentence is quite a jump, however: "It won't be as big, so there's no point in trying to compete at all."
- jack_tripper 1y agoI'm with you on this. I feel like too much boogye-man-ing and FUD scaremongering is taking place on the cover of "China evil and has giants" in order to justify breaking anti-monopoly laws and allowing our own monopolies to form under this justification, that will only benefit shareholders of those companies but eventually harm European consumers via lack of innovation due to lack of competition, price gouging and the European workers via the inevitable layoffs that follow such mergers. If you have two large, slow, bureaucratic and uncompetitive companies, then merging them together won't make the resulting giant less so, but the contrary, it'll be even more inefficient and uncompetitive, and then expect government bailouts because now they're too big to fail.
- dguest 1y agoYou either believe that monopolies produce worse products or you don't. If you believe it, the "I know they are bad" -> "but we need to complete with the boogie man" -> "we need to build our own monopoly" argument is just confusing. So we should make worse products to be competitive? If you don't believe it, you should be explaining why monopolies make better products, not arguing that desperate times call for desperate abandonment of logic.
- izacus 1y agoAlso it would probably be 5x as corrupt. The things you see in EU public tenders is just amazing, especially when they's little to no competition.
- buellerbueller 1y ago>The things you see in EU public tenders Can you give examples of what you (obviously, since you're commenting) have seen, and how typical it is?
- DiggyJohnson 1y agoThis is one of those things that is so obvious as to not require a source. Just sharing my perspective on this conversation, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question to ask if you’re unfamiliar with the space
- noir_lord 1y ago> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Hitchen's Razor. "Everyone knows" is always a dangerous place to stand in any argument.
- fragmede 1y agoHere's a short 30 pages on corruption and collusion risks in Hungary and Poland from the Yearbook of European Law, Volume 41, 2022 https://academic.oup.com/yel/article/doi/10.1093/yel/yeac009/6987910 https://academic.oup.com/yel/article/doi/10.1093/yel/yeac009...
- mtrovo 1y agoAs someone who barely interacts with the people that care about tenders, my impression is that people that usually win are the ones better at playing the game rather than better at the job. The job later is potentially repackaged in chunks and offered to other players that in turn will do the same downstream. Something like Romania gets EU fund money to build roads in Romania with a German engineering project, German contractors, German supplied materials, but Romanian workers. Or in a more particular case part of recycling trash in Germany is basically being dumped illegally in Poland for a while and the same companies keep operating and winning contracts because why not. You create a political class full of lawyers, and you get a country where lawyers thrive, who would have thought?
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- graeme 1y agoThe parent comment is describing a scenario where the Chinese company may get a factual monopoly in Europe because it can outcompete the two European companies due to economies of scale.
- kelnos 1y agoWouldn't cases of possible corporate-enabled espionage, like the one being discussed be a big competitive advantage for the European companies, regardless of their pricing or scale? And that competitive advantage could presumably give them more scale?
- hayd 1y agoOr outcompete because it's state-funded, and can inject things like remote access (that the state might like the option to use one day). It's really confusing that the EU don't consider this "dumping". I thought that was this big thing that they cared about.
- jacquesm 1y agoI definitely would not rule out the occasional strategic bribe. China has a ton of interests in Brussels. Ditto the USA.
- numpad0 1y agoChinese companies will get a factual monopoly no matter what, as long as they keep comparing imports vs domestics on prices. It's not like East Asian "subsidies" are going to end in 3 to 6 months, years, even decades. The imports from timbuktu will be just perpetually cheaper by being imports.
- thinkingtoilet 1y agoSo now you have a state-owned Chinese monopoly controlling your transportation.
- marcosdumay 1y agoJust don't buy from them. Do you think making a local monopoly in Europe will lower European prices? Who the fuck invented that logic of "those companies prices are too high, we have to let them consolidate into a monopoly so they lower their prices"?
- thinkingtoilet 1y agoHow many companies do you think exist that make these types of machines?
- marcosdumay 1y agoAt least 2 in Europe alone, apparently thanks to a single person in a markets protection agency.
- HFguy 1y agoPrices aren’t the problem. China turning off your transportation is.
- marcosdumay 1y agoSo... stop using prices to justify anti-competition arguments and just don't buy from them.
- funcDropShadow 1y agoSo, in order to avoid the negative consequences of a European monopoly, we make sure that a Chinese monopoly prevails? That doesn't seem like a wining strategy for Europe.