Vestager has defended her record, pointing to her subsequent approval of Alstom’s tie-up with another rail rival, Bombardier, and to Siemens’ continued success. “They made it independently, they are competing and they are doing well,” she said at an event hosted by the College of Europe’s Global Competition Law Centre.
Unlike some in his home country, Mundt doesn’t see the veto as a disaster for European industry. “Both companies are alive, competing, and the number of Chinese companies coming into Europe is very limited,” he said.
Vestager also talks of the many big European deals she has cleared, such as Belgium-based brewer AB InBev’s €100 billion acquisition of rival SABMiller in 2016, and the 2020 merger of car rivals Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot to form the fourth-largest global carmaker by volume and the third-largest by revenue.
“The discussion is not about size, it’s about challenge,” Vestager said at the event earlier this month. She talks about companies needing to face strong competition at home to become fit for the global stage.
“Those who won gold medals at the Olympics were trained by the best. They were challenged [at home], and then they could compete against the rest of the world and have medals,” she said.
Growing big firms in key sectors
Opening the door to deals where the law is applied differently to create “a European champion” is “surreal,” Austrian competition authority chief Natalie Harsdorf-Borsch told POLITICO. “When I hear that we need to create a champion, my natural tendency as an enforcer is to ask, wait a minute, who decides, [based] on which parameters?”
