Brussels wants receipts, Beijing won't
Beijing stonewalls Brussels, Klarna trades volume for margin, and a French marketplace finally disparu.
3 Min
Brussels wants receipts, Beijing won't
Beijing stonewalls Brussels, Klarna trades volume for margin, and a French marketplace finally gives up.
Beijing decides Brussels doesn't get to see JD.com's books
On August 19, China's commerce ministry ordered its companies not to cooperate with an EU investigation into JD.com's bid for Ceconomy.
Ceconomy is the Düsseldorf-listed parent of MediaMarkt and Saturn. The deal is worth roughly €2.2 billion. 2.2 billion seconds ago was roughly 70 years ago, around 1956, just so you know.
The investigation isn't new. Brussels opened it in May, under the EU's Foreign Subsidies Regulation.
The FSR lets the Commission demand financial records from any bidder for EU assets, if it suspects the money trail runs through a foreign state.
A formal notice of objections followed in July: preferential financing, tax treatment, or other support a purely commercial buyer wouldn't get.
JD hasn't denied receiving any of it. It has simply arranged, through Beijing, not to discuss it. Or Beijing made them not to discuss it, or..
This isn't the first time, either. China issued an equivalent blocking order in May, in an unrelated FSR case involving the airport-scanner maker Nuctech.
Two blocking orders in four months isn't an accident of timing. It's a policy now applied.
If you are JD, the calculation isn't difficult. Handing over five years of financing documents to an already-suspicious regulator does more lasting damage than losing one German retailer.
Ceconomy is a good asset. MediaMarktSaturn still moves real volume in a market Chinese platforms have struggled to crack organically.
But it's replaceable. The financing playbook isn't. Protecting the mechanism can worth more than winning this auction.
If you are the European Commission, the position is less comfortable than the FSR's drafters probably imagined in.
The regulation assumes the target eventually cooperates, because the alternative is worse than compliance.
A state that can simply instruct its national champions not to answer removes that assumption entirely.
Brussels can proceed anyway, drawing adverse inferences from the silence, the way antitrust regulators have long done with uncooperative merger parties.
But lack of documents (in law lingo adverse inference) is a weaker instrument than documents. And every future Chinese acquirer eyeing a European target is watching to see how much weaker.
Meanwhile, the employees don't know who their ultimate owner will be. Its deal timeline is now a function of two capitals' willingness to blink.
The Rundown
Klarna's profit beat. Its guidance didn't.
Q2 revenue rose 27% to $1.04bn; transaction margin dollars jumped 42%. Full-year margin guidance went up.
Full-year GMV guidance went down, on softer German spending. CFO and CMO are both stepping down in early 2027. Margin over volume, deliberately, while the biggest market cools.
Zalando's About You math is still working itself out.
Q2 GMV rose 20.7% to €4.9bn; B2B revenue up 27.6%.
Full-year guidance was narrowed to the lower half of range, on soft sneaker demand and integration drag.
Argos becomes a marketplace.
Sainsbury's-owned Argos soft-launched a curated marketplace on Mirakl, August 4.
Around 80 "Trusted Sellers" live; international applications open
And Rakuten France (a marketplace) is closing down
Rakuten will close its French marketplace on September 30, taking the Spanish operation down with it.
It couldn't find a buyer. Two binding offers came in, from e-retailer Pixmania and an unnamed investment fund. Rakuten rejected both, on job-preservation and viability grounds.
The numbers explain the rest: active customers down a third since 2016, traffic down 42%.