Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, ANTITRUST NEWS: FTC Releases Update of Merger Investigation Staff Report, (Jan 4, 2013)

By E. Darius Sturmer, J.D.

The FTC announced today that it has released an updated staff report offering analysis of the agency’s major horizontal merger investigations from fiscal year (FY) 1996 through FY 2011. The updated report adds four more years of data to the Commission’s previous report, which was issued in December 2008.

The FTC originally undertook the analysis in 2004 in an effort to promote transparency in merger enforcement. Its original report provided information about the decision to seek relief as it related to measures of market structure and the ease or difficulty of entry in 128 markets derived from 93 investigations. The new data provide information on the levels of market concentration involved in the FTC’s investigation of 264 mergers, covering 1,372 markets over a 16-year period, according to the Commission.

The data tabulations use two statistics from the agency’s Horizontal Merger Guidelines to measure market concentration: (1) the post-merger Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), and (2) the change in the HHI, which reflects changes in market concentration before and after a particular merger. They also track the number of “significant competitors” in the markets in these cases. Data on HHIs are available for 1,359 markets and data on significant competitors are presented for 1,143 markets. The HHI reflects the overall composition of the market and the distribution of market shares of the competing firms.

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