It gives us particular pleasure to provide the truly global and distinguished audience of Merger Control Worldwide with this second (cumulative) supplement. We are extremely delighted to be able to keep all our readers up to date with the various developments which have occurred in the field of merger control globally since the publication of the first supplement. In particular, we are delighted to be able to extend the jurisdictional coverage of the work further and to include on this occasion a new chapter on the Singapore merger control regime.

As ever, we are fortunate to have such a wonderful team of contributors, to whom we are greatly indebted for showing such enthusiasm and commitment to Merger Control Worldwide. Without them, this new supplement would have never seen the light of day. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to them.

We hope that our readers will find the coverage of the supplement useful as they embark on their highly important advisory and research work and we look forward to sending them further updates in the future.

We are delighted to place this first supplement before the readers of Merger Control Worldwide. Early in 2004 and well in advance of the day on which we began turning into reality our idea of preparing an ‘Encyclopedia’ covering merger control regimes around the world, we had planned supplements to bridge the time gap between the first and second editions of the work. At the relevant time, we left it open whether such supplements would be annual or biennial. Indeed, we contemplated opting for the former only if Merger Control Worldwide received a sufficiently warm welcome and provided that recent developments in different regimes would merit it. We are pleased that that has turned out to be the case and that we are able to produce this first annual supplement. More importantly, however, we are pleased to be able to include two new chapters covering South Korea and Mexico – jurisdictions that we had intended to include in the first edition but unfortunately were unable to do so at the time.

This supplement does not cover all the jurisdictions included in the first edition. In the case of most jurisdictions, no important developments have occurred over the past year. It is envisaged that jurisdictions that have not been included in this supplement will be included in the second supplement next year, should they witness any interesting and important developments.