By Monday 13 August, the South African Competition Commission will decide whether to permit the merger between Pearson Plc and Harcourt International.

The merging parties control companies with substantial shares of the educational publishing market in South Africa. Pearson controls Maskew Miller Longman and Harcourt controls Heineman.The educational market is the lion’s share of South African book publishing. The textbook publishing industry is notoriously opaque but according to the publicly available Print Industry Council report, compiled by Genesis Economics and paid for by the Department of Arts and Culture, MML has between 34 and 50% of the educational market (page iii), while Heinemann is believed to have between 11 and 13 %. There are apparently only five major publishers which publish almost all textbooks in South Africa. The consequence of the merger will be that this is reduced to four with one major player dominating the market.
There are no documents suggesting a formal merger between MML and Heinemann. Thats completely beside the point. From the point of view of competition law, a merger takes place when control of two commercial entities is in the hands of a single entity. Section 12 (1) (a) of the Competition Act, No 89 of 1998 states

“For the purposes of this Act, a merger occurs when one or more firms directly or indirectly acquire or establish direct or indirect control over the whole or part of the business of another firm.”

In my opinion this accords with the view of the person in the street who may not know much about company or competition law but knows that if one company controls others in the same market than that company can use that control to influence the market.