The European champion would still be ten times smaller than the Chinese but would have factual monopoly in Europe. I don’t think blocking the merger was entirely unreasonable.
It's really confusing that the EU don't consider this "dumping". I thought that was this big thing that they cared about.
And that competitive advantage could presumably give them more scale?
Your second sentence is quite a jump, however: "It won't be as big, so there's no point in trying to compete at all."
The things you see in EU public tenders is just amazing, especially when they's little to no competition.
Can you give examples of what you (obviously, since you're commenting) have seen, and how typical it is?
People employed there optimize for winning them (at any cost - quid-pro-quo agreements aren't rare in my experience). It's common for several such companies to collude in a way that they get awarded the tenders in a circle ("I get this one, next one is for you.")
Afterwards, they outsource the work to the cheapest lowest bidder (usually IT studends in the cases I've seen for software development, but essentially they'll be bottom of the barrel juniors). The quality of such products is about the same as the quality of any outsourced product which is built only to satisfy a checklist at the end. The US equivalent of that would be a corporation getting a defense contract and then basically have everything built by the cheapest outsourcer in India or similar location. Funny enough, university labs (or spinoffs) tend to be major part of this ecosystem, using grad students as workforce - their credentials tend to give them legitimacy over smaller companies.
The results are as disastrous as you can expect - companies a HNer could expect to win usually don't (due to lack of specialized knowledge on how to game the tender process, lack of connections and cost) and those that do are really there to do the bare minimum, shed the work as much as possible and deliver something they can't get sued over.
It's also not uncommon to see whole chains of such companies - the winner sometimes shares some outsourcing work with "losers" they outsource work further, skimming the funds on top and essentially outsourcing everything to the cheapest engineer they can find.
Dealing with any public EU project has been nothing but misery for me personally (as you can imagine from this post :) and this environment bred some of the most toxic workplaces I've worked with. The products were universally terrible and rarely actually useful for the purpose.
As much as I want independent EU software ecosystem, I don't think using public funding can breed anything but more corruption.
Well, you described what happens when you outsource everything.
Governments used to ... gasp ... employ people to do tasks so that you didn't have to outsource every single piddly task. And since those employees could do the tasks, there was a floor such that selecting nobody and doing it in house was always an option.
Yes, that has different failure modes. However, you have more levers over those failure modes as opposed to a single lever of "Head to court and try to win a legal case."
I mean, if you’re at a place that uses staff aug and managing a project it’s just something you have to watch out from your vendors as table stakes. Whenever a new vendor was hired my fellow low level managers would be making bets on how long before they switched out their best guys with some fresh out of college junior that they’d give a fancy title to.
If you fail to take into account that you get into a broken world view of false equivalences.
You create a political class full of lawyers, and you get a country where lawyers thrive, who would have thought?
https://academic.oup.com/yel/article/doi/10.1093/yel/yeac009...
Hitchen's Razor.
"Everyone knows" is always a dangerous place to stand in any argument.
If you have two large, slow, bureaucratic and uncompetitive companies, then merging them together won't make the resulting giant less so, but the contrary, it'll be even more inefficient and uncompetitive, and then expect government bailouts because now they're too big to fail.
If you believe it, the "I know they are bad" -> "but we need to complete with the boogie man" -> "we need to build our own monopoly" argument is just confusing. So we should make worse products to be competitive?
If you don't believe it, you should be explaining why monopolies make better products, not arguing that desperate times call for desperate abandonment of logic.
Who the fuck invented that logic of "those companies prices are too high, we have to let them consolidate into a monopoly so they lower their prices"?
China turning off your transportation is.