Since 2025 the European Commission has been working on a revision of its Merger Guidelines. They provide guidance on how the Commission assesses mergers and acquisitions. Since then, many corporate players and political voices have repeated the same messages over and over: EU merger control is too strict; European companies cannot scale; and consolidation is necessary to unlock investment, increase innovation and remain competitive on global markets.
Yet a new study published by the Commission in September 2026 tells a very different story. Based on an empirical ex-post assessment of almost 4,000 mergers reviewed and authorised by the Commission since 1990, it shows that, on average, mergers have led to less innovation and higher markups (what companies charge on top of their costs).
In the authors’ own words: “from the perspective of innovation and market power, the results indicate that merger enforcement has likely not been too strict over the past decades. If anything, they point in the opposite direction”.
What almost 4,000 mergers tell us
The findings of the study are clear:
- Innovation has fallen. The number of patents (weighted by the citations they receive to account for their importance) declines by around 18% over the five years after a merger, for both the merging companies and their competitors.
- Profit margins have gone up. Over the same period, average markups and profits of merging firms and their rivals tend to increase by about 3% – 5%.
- Efficiencies have not materialised. The simultaneous increase in profits and decline in innovation among both merging companies and rival firms point to greater market power, not efficiency gains.
The results also challenge the claim that consolidation is necessary to achieve the scale required to compete in emerging technologies.
Interestingly, the results also challenge the claim that consolidation is necessary to achieve the scale required to compete in emerging technologies. The authors consider that there is “little support for a general presumption that mergers in strategically important sectors raise innovation”.
No over-enforcement of merger control
The study’s conclusions are not altogether surprising. Since 1990, the Commission has blocked only 33 transactions out of the more than 10,000 it reviewed (around 0.3%). It has imposed commitments in 522 cases (around 5%). The Commission’s intervention rate in merger investigations has been even lower in recent years. Almost 1,800 mergers have been notified since 2022. Among these, only 3 have been blocked (less than 0.2%) and 43 authorised subject to commitments (less than 2.5%).1
The findings are also consistent with past evidence. In its 2024 report on ‘Protecting competition in a changing world’, the Commission found that, over the past 25 years, market concentration within the EU has increased together with companies’ markups and profits, and that weaker competition can have a negative impact on the competitiveness of EU firms and overall economic growth.
All this directly contradicts claims of over-enforcement of EU merger control. It also confirms what the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) has been saying consistently for years. Consumer welfare relies on the existence of competitive markets.
Consumers pay the price of bad merger control
The lesson is simple. Europe will not become more competitive by letting the biggest companies get even bigger through mergers. Competition is what pushes companies to innovate, invest and offer better prices and quality. When competition is weaker, goods and services get less innovative and of poorer quality. There is also less investment and consumers face higher prices.
Europe needs more competition, not less.
The Commission has itself published the empirical study showing that weak EU merger control has a negative impact on consumers, industry and the European economy as a whole. It must ensure stronger merger control enforcement, not weaker by acting upon the results of this study to resist calls for a weaker EU merger control framework.
The draft Merger Guidelines published in April 2026 already open the door to weaker control. They give too much weight to efficiency claims that are hard to verify and rarely materialise. The final text of the Guidelines must instead focus on the protection of competition. It must keep a high bar for proving merger efficiencies, and include tools to better tackle deals involving the most powerful companies or taking place in already concentrated markets.
Read more: Why consumers need strong EU merger control
- Commission’s Merger Cases Statistics between 21 September 1990 and 30 September 2026: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/mergers/statistics_en ↩︎