Merger og Fréttablaðið and Hringbraut

The Competition Authority has examined the merger of Torg ehf. and Hringbraut Fjölmiðlar ehf. Torg is the publishing company of Fréttablaðið newspaper and also runs the news site frettabladid.is. Hringbraut operates the television station Hringbraut and the news site Hringbraut.is.

The merging parties’ activities overlap in the market for Icelandic news web sites. Based on media surveys, where only a part of national web sites are measured, the merging parties combined share in the market is around 11%. It is clear that other competitors in this field enjoy a considerable advantage compared to the merging parties.

On basis of the small market share of the merging parties and the opinion of The Media Commission among other, the Competition Authority concludes that there are no grounds for intervention because of the merger.