Mergers: Commission authorises proposed joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel

The European Commission has authorised under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed joint venture between the French/Italian group STMicroelectronics and the US company Intel Corporation. The Commission concluded that the transaction would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or any substantial part of it.

STMicroelectronics is active in the semiconductor industry and offers a broad range of semiconductor products, from discrete diodes and transistors to complete platform solutions. Intel offers microprocessors, chipsets, and other semiconductor components, as well as platform solutions for data processing and communications devices. The joint venture will operate worldwide in the sale of so-called "flash memory", a type of memory which is widely used in data storage cards, in mobile phones and other portable devices. The Commission's market investigation revealed that, generally, there are two principal kinds of flash memory products available on the market. One is better suited to store and directly execute software codes (NOR) and the other(NAND) is used in particular for data-intensive storage applications to write data faster onto the memory. The Commission found that strong competitors are present for each of these products and customers would be able to continue sourcing their needs from a sufficient number of alternative vendors .

More information on the case will be available at:

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/mergers/cases/index/m95.html#m_4751