We received a call from the Competition Commission earlier on today, asking to speak to the person in charge of the purchasing of PVCu materials and products. That person wasn’t in to speak to, so I got my question head on and probed a little bit. The most I got out of them was that the inquiry was about the merger between Epwin and Latium.

Further to that, we then received this email:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are conducting some research on behalf of the Competition Commission. The study is on roofline products; fascias, soffits or cladding (excluding guttering and rain water). We would like to speak to people who have some responsibility for purchasing PVC roofline products.

The Interview will be conducted over the telephone and will last around 15 minutes. We will contact you in the near future to see if you would be willing to take part, or you can contact myself, Jane or Hee on 01663 761690.

Please may I reassure you that the telephone interview is conducted in accordance to the MRS (Market Research Society) Code of Conduct, which means that everything you say will remain completely confidential and nothing is ever passed to a third party. Also, just to confirm there would be no sales follow up from the interview.

Please find attached a copy of the letter from Competition Commission with more information about the inquiry.

Kind Regards

Janice Beard

The email also came with a letter of explanation of why the interviews are taking place: competition commission inquiry letter

The commission, as part of it’s investigation, is clearly wanting to gauge the opinion of the industry and wants to see what the rest of us thinks about the Epwin/Latium merger. To be quite honest, other than the story making for a good blog post, I don’t think many of us took much notice of the whole thing. But, as the letter states, these things only become investigated when the merger is referred by another body or organisation. So clearly someone higher up thinks that the merger is going to cause a problem for our industry.

Has anyone else got a call from them or received a similar email and letter?