Apple and Google face more UK antitrust scrutiny over mobile ecosystems
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Britain's competition regulator said it plans to designate Apple and Google with so-called strategic market status for their role in mobile ecosystems , as it steps up scrutiny of what it has described as their duopoly.The plans announced on Wednesday follows findings by an inquiry group at Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that a number of markets relating to mobile internet browsers were not working well for consumers or businesses.Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome dominate the mobile browser market on iPhones and Android devices, respectively.A strategic market status (SMS) designation allows the CMA to impose interventions on a firm, such as requiring it to adhere to specific behaviour so as not to undermine fair competition.In Apple and Google's cases, they could be forced to offer more features and give users the option actively to choose their preferred mobile browser, if recommendations from the CMA's inquiry group are accepted.Both Apple and Google pushed back against the CMA's proposals, with Google calling the step "disappointing and unwarranted.""It is ... crucial that any new regulation is evidence-based, proportionate and does not become a roadblock to growth in the UK," Google's senior director for competition, Oliver Bethell, said.Apple said separately it was concerned that the new rules being considered would undermine the privacy and security protections expected by its users.
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Mint
19 minutes ago
- Mint
Why it has never been better to be a big company
For all the unwieldiness it entails, scale has always brought enormous benefits in business. Fixed costs are set against more revenue, raising profits and supporting investment. Heft brings greater bargaining power with suppliers and financiers. From the early 2000s, the advantages of scale became even more pronounced. Intangible assets, including software and intellectual property, gave the upper hand to companies that could afford to invest in them. Globalisation provided big companies with more room to grow, as well as access to larger—and cheaper—pools of labour. In America, the gap in profitability between big and small firms widened (see chart 1). Economists began to speak of 'superstar" firms racing ahead of the competition. Now size is conferring advantages in new ways. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reinforcing the dominance of big firms over small ones. So is the presidency of Donald Trump, which has raised the importance of resilience and political sway. Yet these same disruptions could spell danger for America's corporate giants. Already companies from Apple to Walmart are discovering how their size can make them a target of Mr Trump's wrath. Start with AI. You might imagine that lumbering leviathans would be too tied up in bureaucracy to make use of the technology. In fact, their scale allows them to invest far more in it than smaller rivals. According to a survey in December by Bain, a consultancy, American companies with more than $5bn in revenue had an average annual budget for generative-AI projects of $27m, five times the level in the preceding February. Those with between $500m and $5bn in revenue, by contrast, had set aside $9m, up by two-thirds over the same period (see chart 2). JPMorgan Chase, America's biggest bank, says it has rolled out AI tools to most of its 320,000 employees. UnitedHealth, the country's biggest health insurer, claims to have 1,000 different applications for the technology. 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We examined the profitability of listed American companies, as measured by their return on invested capital, in nine non-financial sectors before and after the pandemic. For seven of the nine, the biggest firms—those in the top quintile by revenue—were, on average, more profitable across 2023 and 2024 than they were across 2018 and 2019. The bottom quintile, by contrast, became less profitable in the same number of sectors. Bigness tends also to bring increased supply-chain resilience—just as important in a trade war as it was amid covid-19. 'During the pandemic, I kept getting calls from small and medium-sized businesses saying that they could not get shipping capacity. The big companies were, by and large, at the front of the queue," says Philip Damas of Drewry, a shipping consultancy. Such prioritisation pays when companies are rushing to import products into America before tariff deadlines. It helps, in addition, that big companies tend to have more suppliers in more places. 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India.com
22 minutes ago
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