Analysis: “Acquisitions by Joint Ventures and Community Dimension: The General Court Reaffirms the Notion of ‘Undertakings Concerned’ in HeidelbergCement and Schwenk v. Commission (T-380/17)” by David Pérez de Lamo

On 5 October 2020, the General Court dismissed an action for annulment brought by HeidelbergCement and Schwenk against the Commission’s Decision (M.7878) to prohibit the acquisition of Cemex’s Hungarian and Croatian subsidiaries through their full-function joint venture (T-380/17 – as reported here).

By their first plea, the applicants claimed that the Commission was not competent to review the concentration because it did not have a Community dimension pursuant to Article 1(2) of the Merger Regulation, which requires that ‘the aggregate Community-wide turnover of each of at least two of the undertakings concerned is more than EUR 250 million’. In the applicants’ view, the turnover of the parent companies should have been attribut