Pursuant to Article 47 of the Law on Protection of Competition, the Commission for Protection of Competition conducted a sectoral analysis of the state of competition on the market of textbooks for primary education in the Republic of Serbia in the period from 2018-2020.

The commission identified the need to analyze the state of competition on the textbook market, in the light of the frequent changes in the relevant legal framework, as well as certain specificities of this market, which allow schools to opt for textbooks from certain publishing houses in an insufficiently transparent manner.

In the analysis, special attention was paid to the process of issuing and selling textbooks and textbook sets for primary education, as well as the conditions under which textbooks were sold on the market of the Republic of Serbia in the observed three-year period. The research included the analysis of the market structure and market shares of textbook publishers, the analysis of (contractual) relations between textbook publishers on the one hand and their customers, distributors, bookstores and schools, as well as the effects these relations can have on the state of competition on the market. The subject analysis includes the method of forming the price of textbooks, as well as the analysis of the structure of the textbook sales price.

For the purposes of the analysis, the data on 16 publishers of textbooks for primary education and their 10 largest customers, distributors, who further sell the textbooks to schools and bookstores, were collected and processed.

The Commission would like to thank all market participants who duly submitted the requested data in the course of the sector analysis.