For large foreign businesses operating in Hungary, the country’s Competition Office (GVH) can be a major pain in the behind, coming down hard on firms it suspects of engaging in anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior, or of just being too big. So it will be really interesting to see what happens if, as is rumored, the publisher of Hungary’s #1 tabloid newspaper tries to take over its biggest competitor, in the process creating a near-monopoly on the local market for printed media trash.
According to a recent story on index.hu, the local unit of Swiss publishing giant Ringier – which puts out top tab Blikk – wants to buy Híd Rádió Zrt, which among other things publishes second-place Bors. So the GVH must now clarify whether such a marriage – which would keep Bors in circulation – passes regulatory muster. At the end of 2008, Blikk was selling an average of 217,000 per day, while Bors – which means “pepper” in Hungarian – had a circulation of 88,000, and the even smaller Napi Ász (“Daily Ace”).
To put that in perspective, such a merger would swell Ringier’s total daily circulation in Hungary to about 480,000, counting leading “political” daily Népszabadság and sport sheet Nemzeti Sport. (All the other national broadsheets put together sell a grand total of 120,000 copies per day.)
Back in 2001 Ringier gobbled up another rival, Mai Nap, and folded it into Blikk. For a few weeks the move left it in total control of the trash paper market, until some former Mai Nap staffers came out with Színes Mai Nap, which changed its name to Színes Bulvár Lap in 2004 following an infringement suit by Ringier, and finally to Bors.
While the GVH probe would naturally focus on whether a takeover would put Ringier in a dominant market position, it would first have to figure out what exactly constitutes “tabloid” news. Which should be very interesting indeed. Because if the answer is shallow, sensationalistic, and mostly concerned with the trivialities of irritating pseudo-celebrities, they would have to take into account most of the country’s “serious” newspapers as well.