The German administration proposes transaction value thresholds

With little fanfare, on Friday, 1 July 2016, among a raft of other amendments to the Act against Restraint of Competition (‘ARC’; 9th amendment), the Federal Ministry of Economics proposed a far reaching change to German merger notification thresholds making it one of the few jurisdictions worldwide that take jurisdiction based on the size of the transaction, no matter how trivial the sales of the target are in Germany. The policy intention was explicitly to bring into the Bundeskartellamt’s net major deals – struck anywhere in the world – with a high value target whose potential in sales is as yet unrealized. This will often be the case with innovative IT- or life-science targets, or those controlling key technologies, whose innovations have not yet come to market. The Facebook/WhatsApp