Shareholders of both Tesco and Booker have today voted in favour of the proposed £4.1 billion merger of their businesses. The result gives the go ahead for Tesco, the UK’s largest grocery retailer, and Booker, the UK’s largest wholesaler, to merge to form the UK’s largest food group.

The merger received unconditional clearance from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in December following an in-depth Phase 2 investigation. The “vertical” nature of the merger posed some novel issues, and the CMA adopted a new theoretical approach put forward by Frontier to assess the merger. This is now likely to set the benchmark for how other similar mergers are assessed in future.

Frontier’s recent bulletin, Retail Therapy, explores some of the issues. The advisor teams for Tesco and Booker were also recently nominated for the Global Competition Review (GCR) Awards 2018.

Frontier advises Tesco and Booker on issues of strategy, planning and competition policy.

For more information please contact us at media@frontier-economics.com, or call +44 (0)20 7031 7000.