Shaping the Future: The Belgian Competition Authority’s 2025 Roadmap
On 29 April 2025, the Belgian Competition Authority (BCA) announced its priorities for the year, outlining the sectors and strategic initiatives that will underpin its enforcement activities. These priorities demonstrate the BCA’s confidence in leveraging its increased resources to strengthen its enforcement tools and adapt them to the current economic context and new challenges in competition law.
The BCA’s prioritised economic sectors remain largely the same as in previous years, with the addition of the construction sector. The BCA will pay particular attention to cases relating to the agri-food value chain, the construction sector, healthcare, basic services (including regulated professions, financial and banking services, energy, and transport), and the digitalisation of the economy and the telecommunications sector. Notably, the BCA has already initiated several formal investigations within these sectors. For example, on 17 March 2025, the BCA issued a statement of objections to the Roche Group regarding exclusionary practices relating to two anti-cancer medicines.
In addition to the aforementioned sectoral priorities, the BCA has identified five strategic priorities and areas for action.
First, the BCA will continue to conduct sectoral research and inquiries, and publish policy papers and guidelines to strengthen the detection of anti-competitive practices. In particular, earlier this year the BCA initiated a general inquiry into sectoral price revision and indexation mechanisms. While factors leading to inflation can be found in the international environment, such as the pandemic or energy crisis, the BCA plans to investigate whether certain inflationary practices and indexation mechanisms could potentially violate competition law. The BCA also plans to prepare guidelines on sustainability and employee mobility.
Second, the BCA will update its 2017 guide on bid rigging and create new tools to improve the detection of such anti-competitive behaviour as part of its comprehensive enforcement strategy against bid rigging. These initiatives build on the BCA’s actions in 2024 when it adopted two settlement decisions against companies involved in collusion in public procurement in the private security and fire protection sectors.
Third, the BCA is seeking legislative changes to increase the effectiveness of competition rules in the area of merger control. In particular, the BCA will work on modifying its notification form and the criteria for applying the simplified merger control procedure. Additionally, the BCA will consider introducing a “call in” competence to enable it to assess concentrations that do not reach the European and Belgian notification thresholds.
Fourth, the BCA intends to increase national and international cooperation with other public authorities, such as other sectoral regulators, the Belgian Data Protection Authority, and the Ministry of Economy; professional federations; consumer organisations; and competition authorities in other medium-sized EU Member States, such as the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Greece, since these countries sometimes face different competition policy challenges compared to larger Member States.
Finally, the BCA intends to develop a new communication strategy to raise awareness of its actions, simplify access to information, and enhance transparency.
In preparation for increased BCA enforcement, companies, particularly those in the construction, agri-food, healthcare, basic services, and telecoms sectors, should proactively review their indexation policies and tender practices for compliance risks. Companies should also assess planned concentrations below the merger control thresholds early on to anticipate possible BCA scrutiny.
