Ball Corporation may acquire beverage can manufacturer Benepack
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The German Federal Cartel Office has cleared the plan by Ball Corp., Westminster, Colorado (USA), to indirectly acquire 80% of the shares in and sole control of two subsidiaries of Benepack Ltd., Hong Kong (China), via its subsidiary Rexam Limited, Luton, Bedfordshire (UK).
Both parties to the transaction produce aluminum beverage cans. Benepack has been active in Europe since 2020 with a plant in Genk (Belgium) and a recently built plant in Makó (Hungary). The acquirer Ball is a global manufacturer of aluminum packaging solutions with numerous production sites in Europe and Germany (Gelsenkirchen), among others.
Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: "There are a handful of manufacturers of beverage cans in Europe. Although Benepack's market presence is currently still limited, we have looked closely at the competitive effects of the merger, as this young competitor has entered an already concentrated market and has expanded quite rapidly. The acquirer Ball is expanding its already strong market position through the planned merger. However, it was possible to rule out any significant competition concerns. Even after the merger, customers will still have a choice between several competing suppliers."
The Bundeskartellamt conducted intensive investigations and interviewed all competitors operating in Europe as well as around 35 customers (beverage producers and bottlers). According to the findings, the transaction will have a particular impact on market and competitive conditions in western Germany and the neighboring Benelux countries. The decisive factor for the geographic limitation is that although aluminum beverage cans are supplied across borders and are in demand by beverage producers and bottlers, high transport costs limit the area that can be supplied competitively from a specific production site.
In the affected market area, the Luxembourg-based Ardagh Group in particular has several sites for the production of aluminum beverage cans. It acquired these sites in 2016 as part of the implementation of commitments from Rexam Limited, London, which the European Commission had made a prerequisite for the approval of the acquisition of Rexam Limited by Ball Corp. In addition, several locations of other competing suppliers such as Canpack and Crown are available to customers in the affected market area as an alternative.
Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.
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