At least the retailer with a 40 % market share can't deposit the money overseas to some hedge fund because it's a co-op.

But for some reason they can try to expand to next country... Which really puzzles me... After all they are collection of regional "co-ops". Even if the whole model is quite distanced at this point.

Three, Lidl is big enough to be considered relevant competition.

For just the supermarkets, yes. But S-group and Kesko are huge. They own restaurants, banks, hotels, gas stations, home improvement stores, department stores, car dealerships, and a bunch of specialty stores.

Yeah, I used "retail sector" quite carefully there. The breadth of the conglomerates here is vast. It's sort of surreal to me, even by American standards, that this level of market capture is even allowed.