4.1. A Survey Amongst Large European Firms

The motivation for the survey was to receive reports from companies that have been involved in mergers that had to be cleared by the European Commission. A second reason for conducting a survey was the hope to elicit proposals for reform that had grown out of direct experience with DG Comp.

A straightforward method was used in order to receive data: a questionnaire was devised which contained quantifiable as well as open questions. The quantifiable questions can, again, be broken down into two parts, namely one part dealing with the experience of firms with European merger policy in general and the other part dealing with one specific case. Here, the respondents were asked to choose the most complicated case their company had been involved with since 1997. The open questions were added in order to elicit reform proposals. The survey was conducted in November 2002. It thus antedates the recent reforms of EU merger policy.

A total of 42 questionnaires were sent via the European Round Table (ERT) office in Brussels to all member companies of ERT. Companies were promised that information would only be used in anonymised form. Shipment of the questionnaires was handled by the ERT in Brussels in order to make that promise credible. 25 completed questionnaires were returned, a very good response rate, especially if one keeps in mind that not all of the 42 members might have had first-hand experience with mergers on the European level.

Since 1997, these 25 companies have been involved in 153 merger cases. The total number of merger cases that the European Commission has dealt with in the same period was 1,562. Our survey thus covers some 9.8% of all cases. On average, these companies notified 6.1 mergers over the course of the last five years. They are thus quite experienced in merger activities, which means that their evaluation of the predictability of European merger policy should be given some weight – and their suggestions at improvement should be taken very seriously.

Table 2:Descriptive Statistics of the Survey Results

We propose to present the results of the study f udy emulating the chronology of a typical merger case, namely (1) before notification, and (2) after notification.4