PostNord Strålfors Oy and Edita Prima Oy have abandoned the merger notified to the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority (FCCA). The FCCA’s investigation raised concerns that the merger would have led to harmful effects on competition in the markets of transactional printing services.
In October 2023, PostNord Strålfors Oy notified the FCCA of a transaction in which it would acquire control of Edita Prima Oy. The FCCA opened a Phase II investigation on 3 November 2023. On 8 January 2024, PostNord Strålfors Oy informed the FCCA that it would abandon the notified merger, as a result of which the investigation of the matter at the FCCA has lapsed.
Both parties to the merger offer both traditional and digital customer communication management services that enable, for example, companies and authorities to produce and distribute communication to their customers. The FCCA’s investigation raised concerns that the merger would have led to harmful effects on competition in the markets of traditional customer communication management services, or transactional printing services, in Finland. Transactional printing services include the processing, printing and enveloping of invoices, payslips, and other physical documents that are personalized by names, addresses or other personal data.
The FCCA investigated the effects of the merger on competition, for example, by examining the sales data collected from the merging parties and their competitors and the bidding data collected from customers. Based on the FCCA’s investigation, transactional printing should be examined as a market separate from digital customer communication management services even though the share of digital communication has increased. In addition to legislation, the transition from traditional communication to digital communication is limited especially by the willingness and capacities of the end clients to change over to receiving digital communication.
The market of transactional printing services is already highly concentrated. With the proposed transaction, the combined market share of the merging parties would have become high and only two significant players would have remained in the market: the merged entity and Posti. In addition, the bidding analysis showed that the parties are close competitors. The parties did not submit commitments to address the competition concerns.