Heureka wins 400 million crowns from Google over unfair competition

A Prague Municipal Court has ordered Google to pay Czech price-comparison service Heureka 250 million crowns in compensation for lost profits, plus another 150 million crowns in interest — about 400 million crowns in total. The reason: between 2013 and 2016, the Alphabet-owned company artificially boosted its own price-comparison service in search results at the expense of competitors, including Heureka.

This is the first time a Czech company has won a court case over being squeezed out of a digital market. Heureka filed the lawsuit back in 2020 and sought 395 million crowns — the court awarded roughly two-thirds of that amount, but six years of interest on the proceedings pushed the final sum to nearly 400 million. The ruling has not yet taken legal effect.

The groundwork for the dispute was laid by the European Commission back in 2017, when it found that Google had abused its search engine's dominant position in thirteen EU countries, including Czechia, and fined the company 2.42 billion euros — more than 58 billion crowns. The EU Court of Justice finally upheld that verdict in September 2024.

“Google's actions genuinely affected the operation of Heureka, other price-comparison services on the market, and ultimately Czech consumers,” said Heureka Group CEO David Chmelař. According to him, the court's ruling is a clear signal that equal conditions should apply to all players in e-commerce.

Google declined to comment on the case it lost. A spokesperson for its Czech division, Alžbeta Housarová, only noted that the company had already implemented changes back in 2017 that remain in effect since then. She did not say whether Google plans to appeal.

The Czech search engine Seznam is locked in a similar dispute with Google, demanding 10 billion crowns from the American company over the mandatory pre-installation of Google apps on Android smartphones. That case is currently suspended and awaiting resumption.

Heureka is currently owned in equal shares by Renáta Kellnerová's PPF Group and the EC Investments fund of Daniel Křetínský and Patrik Tkáč.

By the Around Prague newsroom