Commercial law | The German Federal Cartel Office has cleared the takeover of a further 58 locations of the supermarket chain real by real Beteiligungs- und Service GmbH, based in Frankfurt am Main, from SCP Retail Operations S.á.r.l., based in Luxembourg, under merger control law.
The takeover is being carried out by means of a management buy-out with the participation of financial investor Dr. Tischendorf. The 58 stores with around 5,000 employees will be managed by a team of real managers together with the Tischendorf family under the “real” brand. The President of the Federal Cartel Office, Andreas Mundt, expressed his relief that the continued existence of further real stores is secured and sees the takeover as an opportunity for competition as well as for consumers. The current clearance relates exclusively to the merger control aspects of the takeover; an antitrust review is still pending.
The investor SCP had acquired the former 276 real stores from Metro and sold them on in the last two years, in particular to Kaufland, Edeka and Globus. The Federal Cartel Office had carried out extensive investigations into the sales and procurement side of the acquisition by Edeka and Kaufland. Several competition law concerns were identified in various regional sales markets, meaning that only some of the locations could be taken over. With regard to the procurement side, which concerns the relationship between food retailers and their suppliers, the Federal Cartel Office has made the takeover of the locations dependent on the condition that locations with a procurement volume of EUR 200 million are sold to medium-sized food retailers. There were no competition law problems with the acquisition of a location package by Globus. Last year, Kaufland and Edeka were also able to clear the takeover of non-competitive real stores within a month.
Source of information: Press office of the Bundeskartellamt, press release dated 02.03.2022
