Pursuant to the provisions of Article 21(1/6) of the Law on Protection of Competition, the Commission for Protection of Competition conducted an inquiry into competitive conditions in the sunflower production and sales market in the territory of the Republic of Serbia for the period 2016-2018.

The purpose of the inquiry was to gain an understanding of the sunflower production and sales market, from a market structure perspective and by observing the market shares of individual market participants, as well as to analyze the trends in sunflower purchase prices during the period observed. The inquiry covered the data on production, purchase, import, and export of sunflower seeds, as well as on the export and import of raw and refined sunflower oil during the period observed.

The inquiry used data provided by the Ministry of Finance – Customs Administration on the import and export of sunflower and sunflower oil, in addition to publicly available information provided by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia on the sunflower and sunflower oil production, as well as information provided by undertakings – sunflower buyers and producers, namely: Dijamant AD from Zrenjanin, Vital AD from Vrbas, Sunce AD from Sombor, Banat AD from Nova Crnja, Victoriaoil AD from Šid, Bimal Trading doo from Belgrade, and Bimal Agri doo from Bečej.

The Commission wishes to express its gratitude to all undertakings for their timely and proper submission of requested data during the inquiry drafting process, and concomitantly invites all undertakings and other members of the expert public to submit their commentaries to the report, to the email address: office.kzk@kzk.gov.rs, with the subject line: Comments to the inquiry into sunflower market.

Noting the importance of this crop for the development of food industry and the overall industrial development, as well as the conclusions of this inquiry, the Commission will put particular emphasis on due-diligence measures in the future in order to monitor the behavior of undertakings and identify particular circumstances prevailing in this market which might indicate any violation of the Law on Protection of Competition.