This followed news on Friday that competing media company Caxton had its appeal against the Competition Tribunal’s decision to limit Caxton’s scope of intervention in the merger “dismissed with costs” by the Competition Appeals Court. <\/p>\n
An analyst described Caxton’s attempt as “stalling tactics”, also saying it was unlikely that the tribunal would throw the deal out; yet it might impose conditions relating to cross-subsidisation if pressed hard enough. <\/p>\n
Earlier on this year, Caxton — which holds substantial interests in print media and controls extensive printing operations — informed the tribunal of its intention to intervene in the merger, which would give full control of the two companies to Naspers. <\/p>\n
The tribunal allowed Caxton to intervene but limited the extent of intervention to bundling, cross-subsidisation and foreclosure. <\/p>\n
Caxton then took recourse at the appeal court to attempt to have the decision overthrown, or as it put it; to explore “a technicality” to determine whether the tribunal “had the power to limit the scope of Caxton’s intervention at the intervention stage”. <\/p>\n
Caxton lawyer Lesley Morphet said previously that it was “not in dispute (whether) at the hearing stage, the tribunal is entitled to exclude irrelevant evidence”. <\/p>\n
Johncom, Naspers and Caxton have been requested to attend the hearings, which will take place from today until Friday, following which the tribunal will either give its blessing to the merger or reject it as anticompetitive. <\/p>\n
Johncom CEO Prakash Desai said on Friday: “It would not be appropriate to comment at this stage,” as possible questions being raised could also be raised at the hearings, and as this was a legal process, the media would not be a suitable way to debate the issue. Naspers reflected similar views and said it had “no comment to make until the hearings were complete”. <\/p>\n
Caxton said previously Johncom had been a stabilising force in the company, effectively balancing any anticompetitive behaviour Naspers might exude in its appeal to the commission. <\/p>\n
The commission disregarded Caxton’s views and recommended to the tribunal that the deal go through without conditions. <\/p>\n
Caxton is expected to continue with its appeal, claiming that Naspers would have both the ability and incentive to bundle advertising across print and television to the detriment of rivals. <\/p>\n
It will also raise issues relating to foreclosure and cross-subsidisation, claiming that Naspers would be capable of offering discounts to advertisers, which it could recoup from subscription fees in its pay-TV channel M-Net and satellite DStv offerings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE Competition Tribunal will today begin a five-day hearing into media company Naspers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s acquisition of competitor Johncom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 38% stake in television channel and content provider M Net and SuperSport, valued at just more than R4bn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecoms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}