Duopoly - Examples in Business

Examples in Business

The most commonly cited duopoly is that between Visa and Mastercard, who between them control a large proportion of the electronic payment processing market. In 2000 they were the defendants in a US Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit. An appeal was upheld in 2004.

Examples where two companies control a large proportion of a market are:

• Moody's and S&P in the Ratings market
• PepsiCo and Coca-Cola in the soft drink market
• Gillette and Wilkinson Sword/Schick in the razor blade market
• Airbus and Boeing in the commercial large jet aircraft market
• Marvel Comics and DC Comics in the comic books market
• Intel and AMD in the consumer desktop computer microprocessor market
• The local cable company and the local telephone company in residential broadband Internet access
• Analogue mobile phone service (1983–2008) assigned bandwidth for just two carriers (A/B); in much of North America these effectively were "Alternate" and "Bell" (or the incumbent regional telephone landline monopoly in the area). Windsor-Detroit was very adversely affected by this spectrum allocation limitation.
• The Home Depot and Lowes in the American retail home improvement market.
• Kodak and Fujifilm in motion picture film stock and color 135 film markets
• K-Kauppa and S-Group in the Finnish supermarket market (jointly they control 75% of supermarket market)
• Foodstuffs and Progressive Enterprises in the New Zealand supermarket market (jointly they control 90% of supermarket market)
• Woolworths and Coles in the Australian supermarket market (share 79% of the supermarket market)
• Nvidia and the ATI subsidiary of Advanced Micro Devices in the mainstream graphics card market.
• LexisNexis and Westlaw in legal research; the two companies together have been jokingly referred to as Wexis
• PetroChina and Sinopec in Chinese oil production.
• Pakistan State Oil and Shell Pakistan in white oil products in Pakistan (share almost 90% of the white oil market in the country)
• Rai and Mediaset in the Italian television market.
• Telstra and Optus in the Australian telecommunications market.
• Dish Network and DirecTV in the U.S. satellite provider market.
• Televisa and Azteca in the Mexican multimedia market. (jointly they control 95% of the multimedia market)
• Handango and Motricity in mobile content retailing market.
• Migros and Coop in Swiss retail food market.
• FedEx and UPS in the United States express small package delivery industry.
• MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch in the United States domestic beer market.
• Canon and Nikon in high end imaging optics, film and digital cameras (especially in DSLRs)
• Kleenex and Puffs in facial tissues.
• RTM and Media Prima in Malaysia's free-to-air television station market.
• Starhub and Singtel in Singapore's cable television market.
• SMRT Corporation and SBS Transit in Singapore's transport system.
• Verizon and AT&T in the U.S. telecommunications market.
• GeoEye and DigitalGlobe in the U.S. satellite imaging market.
• Mitre 10 MEGA and Bunnings Warehouse in the Australian and New Zealand retail/trade timber and hardware market (Share 85% of the timber and hardware market).
• MetroTV and tvOne in television news broadcasting in Indonesia.
• Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr CTEC in the chairlift industry.
• Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corporation in the hard disk drive market (after the acquisition of Samsung's hard drive division by the former and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies by the latter)