Last August, the Italian Competition Authority (“AGCM”) has unconditionally cleared in Phase 1 the acquisition of PittaRosso S.p.A. (“PittaRosso” or “the Target”) by the investment fund IQ-EQ Fund Management (Ireland) Limited (“IQ-EQ”). In the context of this merger, Lear has been appointed to assist law firms Legance – Avvocati Associati and Gilberti Triscornia e Associati to address the potential competitive concerns raised in relation to the presence of horizontal overlaps between the activities of the Target and Scarpe&Scarpe S.p.A., which was already part of IQ-EQ’s portfolio, in the Italian retail markets for the sale of non-luxury casual shoes, sports shoes, clothes and accessories.
The Lear team – Partner Salvatore Nava and Consultants Silvia Brumana and Gabriele Dente – designed customised isochrones for each store of the Target by leveraging on anonymised information of the customer base of each store, and proposed an estimation methodology for the size of each relevant market in order to better capture the specificities of local competition for the purpose of the competitive assessment. The AGCM accepted the methodology proposed by Lear and unconditionally cleared the transaction.