Giulia DEL BRENNA

Policy topics Giulia DEL BRENNA is active on

What Giulia DEL BRENNA has said (6)

• “So why end of 2026? Because it is complicated. As Mr. Schwab rightly said, unique price is not good. Um, this is not a way of respecting freedom of business. It is a complicated issue. We saw it and, uh, you mentioned, um, Mr. Varadkar's on what happened in Bulgaria, in Croatia, even in Sweden, supermarket boycotts, all of a sudden price spike. And I have to say in a very open fashion. But we try to understand why. And it was extremely complicated. It takes months in dominant position for the DG competition to look, to look at what happened in the past. So we really want to do, and we are soon launching a study to really see what are the factors and where we should act in order to respect, uh, freedom of doing business. If I buy in this neighborhood, it's far more expensive than in Molenbeek. And that should not change because, you know, it's different willingness to pay. Um, and we wanted to look at ways to have, uh, all stakeholders acting in a fair way. So trading practices have to be fair all along in order to give, uh, benefits also to consumers. Thank you.”
  EU restrictions on unfair commercial practices · EU Competition policy
• “But why are these consumers prices? How are these prices set? We know they raised, but they didn't raise in the same way everywhere in the European Union. So how are they set and why are they raising. This is quite a complex issue. There are a number of factors. And not only territory supply constraints. The price level at which retailers sell their products depends on taxation, including VAT levels, labour costs, cost of transport and logistics, price of rent, energy cost, etc. and also totally legitimate business practices. Retailers, which are our window to the price, operate with high fixed costs and low margins, typically around 3%. With inflation. All these factors went up and some retailers absorbed a part of the rise, but not all of it. Competition has also a strong influence on consumer prices in the EU. There are high competition markets and lower competition markets. Competition depends a lot on consumers. In some countries they will easily switch from one supermarket to another for better prices. What typically happens in Germany? In other markets, they will. Be more faithful to their preferred retail chain, as it happens in Belgium.”
  EU Single Market harmonisation · VAT harmonisation · EU Competition policy
• “Thank you very much. Thanks for having us at this very important hearing. Um, so I will I'm just have the privilege to start. So I hope I will not impinge in the presentations of later on. And please do cut me if I am too long. So inflation is the first driver behind soaring consumer prices. And you asked me here to talk about the role of territorial supply. But let me put a bit of context. Uh, Context. As we all know, the Covid 19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have resulted in an unprecedented inflation period, notably on goods consumers used daily. In 2022, the EU annual inflation reached nine 2%, unprecedented and compared with 2021, when we had a two comma 9%. It more than tripled a year later in 2023. The inflation rate went down to two comma nine and seems to have stabilised. In May this year it amounted to one comma nine and 2% in June. Still, this has restrained consumers budgets and consumers reacted fiercely to soaring consumer prices. We even had some instances of supermarket strikes, like in Croatia, for example. Just to illustrate it, in April 2025, the commission's consumer confidence indicator shows that consumers expect that prices will continue to increase strongly over the next 12 months. I will leave the consumers on the figures on consumer confidence and to my colleague Andy, just for the second panel and more details on inflation to the colleague of the European Central Bank that will be talking after me.”
  EU approach to electricity market and prices · EU competences on consumer protection and product standards
• “And if you allow me, I will continue referring to tasks which make it shorter for everybody. These are barriers set up by certain large manufacturers, and we estimated in 2020 that they could amount to a cost for consumers or 14 billion per year. We use competition law to act against the seas, and we've been doing for a while. The biggest recent case is the one on Mondelez that was fined with 340 million for hindering cross-border trade on chocolate, biscuits and coffee. They did not appeal. I know other investigations are there now. And you give me. I'll summarize. This is why. But this applies only when there is a dominant position, like the case of cookies, when there is no dominant position, investigation can find instances of TTS, but nothing will happen. The Competitiveness Council asked us to intervene for all cases and this is why in the single market strategy territory supplies constraints were named one of the Terrible Ten, i.e. one of the biggest barriers in the single market. And this is why we indicated that we will act, but we also indicate that it is complicated and we will develop tools against this thesis. And this is what we are working on now. Thank you very much.”
  EU Single Market harmonisation · EU restrictions on unfair commercial practices · EU Competition policy
• “Thank you very much. So I will try to condensate a bit. Fighting territories supply constraints is basically having the single market work well. The single market works well for consumers in Strasbourg. They take the car, they go to jail. I did it myself. It's great. It doesn't work extremely well for retailers in Strasbourg that cannot have the German wholesale prices and the investigations of DG competition in situations of dominant position showed it refusal to sell. They showed a strategic use of language in labels. They showed strategic use of sizes of packaging. And this has been proved. So what will we do? We are first of all we try to raise awareness. Not all Member States are aware of this situation. We saw it when we did a fact finding and not all consumer associations are aware of the situation. We also did the stakeholder dialogue exactly to to show that. And a lot of interesting things came up, for example, that in Luxembourg people cannot buy online from other countries, but there is a service of the Luxembourgish post, which is you have to pay. That allows to have a fake address in Germany and then we send it to the person. But but you have to pay for that. So it's quite creative and perhaps not exactly in the spirit of the single market.”
  EU Single Market harmonisation · Geo-blocking · EU Competition policy
• “The cost of living crisis. Crisis is blurring these lines, but they are still a feature of different markets and different consumers. The regulatory framework has also an influence on competition. The more restrictive the regulatory framework is in a country, the less competition there will be. One important component of consumer price is the sourcing price. That means the price at which retailers purchase the products they then sell to consumers. This is referred to as the whole sale price. And it is there where we've been noticing for a while differences. Big differences in prices. In 2020, a study carried out by the commission showed that a wide range of prices were charged across the EU by manufacturers to retailers for the purchase of specific branded products. They could not be fully explained by the factors, which are typically applied to explain price differences between member states, such as taxation, labour costs, raw material costs, production costs and pricing of logistics that can vary widely. If you are in the centre of Europe, in a flat land, or if you are high up in the mountains with difficulty of access. It came to light that these unjustified price differences between geographical markets in the EU for daily consumer goods could be caused by what we call territorial supply constraints.”
  EU Single Market harmonisation · Geo-blocking