Turns Out Most of France's “Competing” PC Hardware Retailers Are the Same Company

When French PC builders compare prices between LDLC, Materiel.net, and TopAchat, they generally assume they're checking three independent retailers competing for their business. In most cases, they aren't.

One company, five storefronts

The LDLC Group, headquartered in Limonest, France, owns:

A consumer comparing prices across these storefronts, believing they're surveying the competitive landscape, is in most cases comparing one company's pricing strategy applied across several branded fronts.

Does this actually affect prices?

To test whether this consolidation translates into real, measurable price differences, we compared the German hardware retail market, where the largest tracked retailers (Alternate, NBB, Mindfactory, Caseking) are genuinely independent companies with no shared ownership structure, against France.

The price data is consistent with what economic theory would predict. Across 22 identical GPU models tracked simultaneously in both countries, with a minimum of two independent retailers verifying each price point, Germany consistently returns the lowest average price in the EU. France trails by 5% to 9.5% on average, and the gap widens considerably on specific models:

Same product, same manufacturer warranty, sold to a consumer in a different country, at a meaningfully different price.

The broader price environment

This consolidation effect is compounding an already difficult period for GPU buyers across the EU. Tracking the same 153 GPU models daily over the past 3 months shows an average price increase of approximately 32% since June. The increase was not gradual: prices were essentially flat for the first two months, then rose sharply over a roughly 4-week window in late July and early August, before plateauing at the new, higher level, where they have remained since.

The increase was also not evenly distributed across the market. Budget-tier cards saw the steepest proportional increase:

Budget buyers: the segment least able to absorb a 40% price hike, have taken the largest hit.

Methodology

All price comparisons in this article use a fixed basket methodology: the same set of specific products, tracked continuously at the same set of retailers, with no substitutions during the measurement period.

This avoids a common distortion in simple daily averages, where a lower-priced product selling out and dropping off the tracked list can artificially inflate the apparent average price, even when no individual product's price has changed.

Each comparison point required data from a minimum of two to three independent retailers to reduce the risk of a single retailer's pricing anomaly skewing the result. Prices are aggregated from continuous 6-hour scrape cycles across the 25 EU retailers tracked on PriceSquirrel, over the six months ending August 2026.