Airbus/Air France JV - Five case insights on efficiencies in EU merger control

On 28 April 2026, the European Commission granted unconditional Phase I clearance to the Airbus/Air France joint venture (JV) for A350 global component maintenance services. The Commission describes this case as "the first example of the renewed role of efficiencies in the overall assessment of a transaction". [1] 

Compass Lexecon's David Sevy, Jeremiah Juts, Hippolyte Brosse and Valerio Serse advised the parties to the Airbus/Air France JV on the competitive assessment of potential harms and benefits. In this article, they consider how the investigation already put into practice the approach outlined in the European Commission's Draft Merger Guidelines and the recent economic study on dynamic effects. [2] They draw five insights from their experience on the case and highlight the implications for future cases.

The views expressed in this article are the views of the authors only and do not necessarily represent the views of Compass Lexecon, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, its employees, or its clients.

This case study briefly describes the key factual background to the case before developing the following insights:

• Efficiencies in EU merger control: engage early with how benefits inform the assessment of harm – This case demonstrates that even when no impediment to competition is evident, explaining a transaction's benefits early can reinforce that conclusion. The precise role of those efficiencies, however, depends on the economic relationship between the potential harms and benefits.
• Dynamic competition: the benefit of using historical comparisons – Experience in comparable markets helped the Commission assess how competition might develop in the future in the relevant market. While close comparisons were available here, exact parallels are unnecessary. Comparability is a matter of degree: the experience here can be applied elsewhere, provided that degree of comparability is properly assessed.
• Merger-specificity of efficiencies: a more realistic assessment of alternatives – On occasion, the merger-specific limb of the efficiencies test has been applied unrealistically: assessing transactions against alternative scenarios that are infeasible, less effective, or inconsistent with the underlying counterfactual. That was not the case here. The Commission examined what contractual alternatives could realistically deliver and concluded the JV was superior.
• Verification of efficiencies in Phase 1: engage early on the methodology and evidence required – The Commission accepted there were benefits but could not verify them based on the evidence available in Phase 1. Starting early helps, but there is a limit on what can be achieved in pre-notification where quantifying benefits requires detailed operational analysis, expertise, and data that are difficult to assemble while the businesses remain separate. It didn't matter here. But in cases where benefits must be balanced against a quantified harm, early engagement will need to address both what the Commission requires for verification and what the parties can feasibly produce.
• Economic analysis and market testing: making them work together – The Draft Merger Guidelines have ambitious aims, and a traditional analytic toolkit to pursue them with. However, we should avoid a false dichotomy. At the most effective points in the investigation, quantitative analysis and traditional tools such as market testing guided and reinforced each other: analysis helped refine the questions put to customers, whose responses tested the explanations.

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