Europe has no Google, Tesla, Alibaba or BYD. That absence fuels perennial hand-wringing about the continent's failure to produce corporate world-beaters, and regulators are now responding. Brussels is preparing its biggest overhaul of merger rules in decades, prompted partly by Mario Draghi's 2024 competitiveness report arguing EU competition policy must do more to stimulate innovation and help businesses scale globally.

The 2004 framework prioritized protecting consumers from price hikes through vigorous competition. That approach feels outdated in an era of tech platforms and AI hyperscalers where scale and massive R&D investment determine success. The European Commission's draft guidelines preserve the core goal of maintaining competition while directing enforcers to weigh scale, innovation, investment and resilience as potentially pro-competitive factors. The guidance acknowledges that firms expanding to compete globally can benefit the EU economy—provided they demonstrate credible evidence their mergers will deliver promised benefits.

Yet merger reform alone cannot address Europe's structural challenges. EU-level merger blocks remain relatively rare; the most prominent recent case was the thwarted Alstom-Siemens rail tie-up seven years ago. More European deals in banking and telecoms have collapsed due to national government resistance. The real obstacles to corporate growth are access to capital, fragmented national markets and regulatory complexity. Completing the single market, establishing a capital markets union and creating a unified "EU Inc" corporate framework would matter far more than tweaking merger guidelines.