Juan Roig lowers prices

MERCADONA, Spain’s largest supermarket chain, is cutting the price of 500 items by 10 cents to ease the cost‐ of ‐ living crisis.

The initiative should bring an annual saving of €150 for each client, Mer‐cadona said.

The family‐owned com‐pany would remain faith‐ful to its commitment to lower retail prices as cost prices fell, Mercadona sources added. These were already falling but because it was a slow pro‐cess, they explained that the company had decided to get ahead by lowering the price of 500 staple products, which would be singled out in the shops.

The chain also plans to take advantage of market opportunities to lower the price of fresh pro ‐duce.

The initiative will cost the company around €200 million with a 0.6 percentage point effect on its profit margin, which Mercadona calculates has shrunk by 1.1 percentage points since 2020.

Presenting last year’s accounts and announcing net profits of €718 mil ‐lion, Mercadona presi ‐dent Juan Roig admitted that prices had increased “tremendously” but pointed out that these

AMAZON’S proposed takeover of iRobot, makers of Roomba vacuum cleaner, is under scrutiny from the UK’s Competition and Mar‐kets authority (CMA).

Amazon is keen to ex‐pand its smart home appli‐ances operation, but the CMA is looking into whether the deal could lead to what it described as a “substantial lessening of competition.” rose by 10 per cent while the company’s overheads increased by 14 per cent.

The discounts were not a temporary measure, Mercadona said. Nor were they a “shopping basket” of products with fixed prices like those of French supermarkets but were permanent reduc ‐tions.

Checking out

Amazon announced that it was buying Mas‐sachusetts‐based iRobot last August in a $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion) takeover agreement but a month later the US au‐thorities announced that they would review the deal.

In February 2023, the Fi‐nancial Times revealed that European competition au‐ thorities also planned to ex‐amine the takeover.

Both Amazon and iRobot said they were “working co‐operatively” with the regu‐lators over the merger.

The CMA is also investi‐gating Amazon’s fake online reviews while another probe centres on anti‐com‐petitive practices.