The Bundeskartellamt has today cleared Thalia Bücher GmbH’s acquisition of assets of insolvent buecher.de GmbH & Co. KG.

The Thalia group is by far Germany’s largest brick-and-mortar book retailer. It will acquire the existing business operations of buecher.de, including its customer relationships and the buecher.de brands and domains. buecher.de only sells books online.

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: “Thalia has a significant market position in brick-and-mortar book retail and is the largest omnichannel provider. In the present case we focused our examination on the procurement market for books, where Thalia plays an important role for publishers. Ultimately, however, the merger could be cleared in the first phase of merger control. The clearance decision was primarily based on the fact that, on the procurement side, buecher.de will account for only a very limited increase and that there are other strong buyers or groups of buyers. On the sales side, there is a significantly larger online retail competitor, Amazon, so that acquiring the comparatively small buecher.de business was not expected to give rise to competition concerns.”

Even when considering a possible overall market for brick-and-mortar and online book retail, customers will have sufficient alternatives to choose from, including independent bookshops, other bookstore chains such as Hugendubel and online retail.

However, regarding the procurement of printed books, Thalia already has considerable buyer power over publishers and wholesalers. In this respect, a major difference between Thalia and Amazon, another strong buyer, is that Thalia has brick-and-mortar stores across all of Germany, mostly located in city centres. Thalia’s access to end customers is thus different from Amazon’s, which may make a notable difference when promoting newly-launched books, for example, and may considerably strengthen Thalia’s position when negotiating with publishers and wholesalers. Nevertheless, the Bundeskartellamt’s investigations have shown that acquiring buecher.de would ultimately only very slightly increase Thalia’s procurement volume. This is also true when taking into account Thalia’s previous acquisition of the Weltbild assets (see press release of 16 September 2024). The planned merger could therefore be cleared in the first phase of merger control.