Bundeskartellamt clears acquisition of Share Now by Stellantis

The Bundeskartellamt has today cleared the acquisition of Share Now GmbH, Berlin, by Stellantis N.V., Amsterdam.

Share Now offers car sharing services in the German cities Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart. Stellantis is the holding company of the Stellantis Group, which was formed in 2020 as a result of the merger between the automobile manufacturers Peugeot S.A. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. The Stellantis subsidiary Free2Move is a provider of mobility services. However, the subsidiary’s services offered in Germany do not include car sharing services.

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: “Our investigations have shown that, depending on the distance which has to be covered, consumers consider a wide range of different mobility solutions to get around a city. More and more mobility providers have therefore started to also integrate their offers in third-party platforms via which end consumers can make use of several different mobility services (e.g. e-scooters, taxis and car sharing). Against this backdrop and in the absence of overlaps between the activities of Share Now and Stellantis in the car sharing sector, the merger project did not raise any competition concerns.”

Customers looking for car sharing services especially use apps to search for, reserve and book rental vehicles without interacting with the service provider’s staff. Car sharing services are mostly offered either as station-based car sharing (customers have to pick up and return the car at specific “stations”) or free-floating car sharing (users can pick up and return the vehicle anywhere within a certain delimited area in a given city, using approved parking areas such as public parking spaces). While car sharing services may have to be distinguished from other mobility solutions, such as car rentals, taxi services and public transport, these mobility solutions nevertheless exert a certain competitive pressure on the car sharing business.

Share Now’s market shares in the regional markets Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Munich are high. So far, however, Stellantis does not offer any car sharing services in Germany, which is why there are no market share additions in this area. With regard to any potential for market foreclosures to the detriment of competing car sharing providers or providers of multimodal mobility platforms, the merger project does not raise any competition concerns either. In particular, the Bundeskartellamt’s investigations have shown that Stellantis would have no economic incentives to refuse such platform providers access to Share Now’s application programming interface.

Share Now was one of six joint ventures established in 2018 in the course of combining the mobility solutions of Mercedes-Benz and BMW. At the time, the European Commission cleared the merger subject to two conditions: Granting application programming interface (“API”) access to third-party providers of multimodal platforms to allow them to also display the car sharing services offered by Mercedes-Benz and BMW (the “API Commitment”), and granting access to the multimodal mobility app “moovel” (now “Free Now”) to interested car sharing providers (the “Aggregator Platform Commitment”). Stellantis will also comply with the API Commitment in the future. Free Now is not part of the merger project and remains with Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

To date, the Stellantis subsidiary Free2Move offers car sharing services in two European cities, namely in Paris and Madrid. Since March 2020, Free2Move has also been offering car rental related services in Germany.