Competition law in Slovakia has undergone an interesting evolution in recent years. In this article, we look at the key developments in competition law over the recent period and try to assess where this dynamic field may be heading next.
A year of conceptual steps
In our view, the past year was marked by several conceptual measures taken by the Antimonopoly Office of the Slovak Republic (AMO). The first half of 2025 saw the publication of several AMO guidelines. The AMO has updated its guideline on calculating turnover in concentrations. It then issued guideline on assessing the economic impact of its own interventions. With this, the AMO declared its intention to publish an estimate of the impact of its activities annually. And it did so, reporting that in 2023 and 2024 its interventions saved Slovak consumers approximately EUR 14 million.
The most important soft‑law development, however, is arguably the AMO's new prioritisation policy (discussed in detail in our separate article). In this policy, the AMO abandoned the specification of particular sectors, clearly signalling that no area of business is outside its focus. At the same time, it deprioritised the extraordinary‑circumstances rule concerning unnotified concentrations, even though the statutory notification obligation remains in place.
In the second half of 2025, the AMO published several long‑awaited outputs from its sectoral analyses. The first were reports concerning the food sector, specifically, a general report on the functioning of the food supply chain and a focused report examining whether geographic restrictions on supplies occur. The AMO also released a report on the state of competition in Slovak labour markets, which attracted attention abroad as well (see our separate article for Antitrustpolitics.com). Although these reports did not directly identify major competition issues in Slovakia, they indicate the sectors in which the AMO is now looking more closely.
Alongside these conceptual steps, the AMO naturally continued enforcing competition law. The AMO imposed first fine for an agreement on the labour market. However, in 2025 it imposed a fine for bid rigging only in one case. The AMO also intervened in a case involving alleged abuse of dominance on real estate portals and closed a case concerning alleged abuse by bus stations. It also fined for failure to notify a concentration in the gambling sector or other procedural infringements such as failure to provide cooperation at an inspection or failure to provide information. However, no enforcement case in 2025 stood out for the amount of the fine imposed, as all fines remained below EUR 1 million. Compared with previous years and the historic EUR 20 million fine for failure to notify a bakery-sector concentration in 2024, the past year can be seen as a calmer one in terms of competition-law enforcement.
2026: A year of enforcement?
In 2026, we do not expect such a “quieter” enforcement approach. The current AMO management began its term in 2023, and it was precisely at the turn of 2023 and 2024 that the AMO was highly active in carrying out inspections and initiating administrative proceedings in cartel matters. Given that the AMO has three years to issue a decision, it is reasonable to expect that 2026 will bring the first outcomes of the current management’s activities in the area of cartel agreements.
In addition, the AMO will likely be fighting for its continued independent existence, as the government is considering merging it with the Public Procurement Office into a single competition authority, following the Czech model.
For this reason, 2026 can be expected to unfold in rather turbulent waters for Slovak competition law.
