· The degree of integration of the market is also very variable: ranging from 10% (Italy) to 80% (Ireland). This variation suggests that defining a common, coherent and relevant regulatory regime for the whole of the European Community will prove difficult.

· The countries where the highest degree of integration occurs are mostly the smaller ones. Here one company, or a group of companies, tends to control nearly all the market (in terms of admissions): this is the case in Ireland, with Ward Anderson, Belgium with the Bert-Clays group, and Portugal with Lusomundo. In these three cases, the companies concerned are all nationally-owned and controlled. In the United Kingdom, there is also a high degree of horizontal integration. But the structure of the industry there is different: the market is obviously substantially larger than that of the countries mentioned above; it is also by nature more oligopolistic, as the proportion of the market controlled by the main player does not exceed 30%; the major players are also North-American companies or their subsidiaries(2).
The Netherlands' industry also belongs to this group of highly-integrated countries, as a fourth player, Minerva, closely follows Wolff; it controls 9% of the market. The four main players between them account for 73% of admissions (including programmed cinemas).

· The degree of integration is lower in Denmark and France, where the proportion of the market by admissions controlled by the three main players is 30-50%. Netherlands and Denmark are characterised by the power of MGM's cinemas (a 50/50% joint-venture with Nordisk in Denmark), however in France the three main circuits are national players.

· In Germany and Spain, the market is more fragmented, and the three main players account for less than one third of admissions. The degree of integration is at its lowest in Italy, as, apart from Cinema Cinque, the rest of the sector was dominated by regional companies until 1992. The founding, in 1993, of a new cinema network by Cecchi Gori has to be taken into account, but has not, as yet, fundamentally altered the situation. Moreover, the big international players (particularly UCI and Warner) are now taking an active interest in Italy. It is worth noting in this context that these three countries - Germany, Spain and Italy - are countries where regional factors are very strong, a fact which undoubtedly creates a powerful obstacle to the creation of national networks within the exhibition sector. These countries constitute the majority of the "extensive pole" of the exhibition industry as defined above.

· If their contribution is measured by admissions rather than numbers of screens, then the part played by the market leaders is mostly larger, as Figure 14 shows: there is a marked "leader-effect" which is by no means confined to exhibition, but which, in exhibition, is derived chiefly from the fact that the screens of the main players are almost invariably in the best locations. This "leader-effect" is also linked to the nature of programming of the circuits, as the "leader" can benefit, in terms of advertising, choice of films and cinema quality, to a greater extent than the rest of the sector.

· The difference between screen share and admissions share is not uniform across countries. It is particularly high in Belgium, Portugal and Denmark; this is partly because the three main players' numbers of admissions and the number of weekly admissions per seat are both higher there than elsewhere. By contrast, the difference is more moderate in the UK and Ireland, which reflects the fact that the big networks there (MGM and Odeon in the UK, Ward Anderson in Ireland) have a mixed bag of cinemas: certainly, some of these are modern and profitable, but there are also some old cinemas of which it is difficult to dispose.