Nicola Theron

Prof. Nicola Theron is a Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting. She is the Head of the Economic & Financial Consulting practice in South Africa. FTI Consulting has specialist advisory teams in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Stellenbosch. Nicola specialises in the application of competition and regulatory economics and is a former part-time member of the SA Competition Tribunal. She maintains an academic involvement as extraordinary professor at the University of Stellenbosch, Economics department.

Prior to joining FTI Consulting, Nicola was the Managing Director of Econex, where she specialized in competition, trade and regulatory economics. She also worked as a full-time academic for a number of years, prior to joining Econex.

Nicola has been involved right from the start when the SA Competition Act was introduced in 1998 and the competition authorities started their functions in 1999. She has provided expert witness and numerous economic reports for various large clients in proceedings before the Competition Commission and the Competition Tribunal. Important cases where Nicola advised either the parties or the Commission include: the abuse of dominance case against SAA (loyalty rebates) the abuse of dominance complaint against BATSA (exclusive agreements), the margin squeeze case against Senwes, abuse of dominance case against MTN and Vodacom (pricing abuses), the abuse of dominance case against Computicket (exclusive contracts) etc. She has also advised companies on the economic impact of a range of regulatory interventions and has given testimony before Nersa (e.g. on petroleum pipeline tariffs) and before ICASA (e.g. on asymmetric mobile termination rates). In the healthcare sector, Nicola has provided ongoing support to one of the listed hospital groups in the Health Market Inquiry. She also provided expert input into the litigation around the initial Single Exit Price regulations and has been involved in modelling the cost of the proposed National Health Insurance system. Nicola also served as a part-time member of the Competition Tribunal during 2008 and 2009.

Nicola holds a Ph.D., in Economics from the University of Stellenbosch, as well as a Masters degree (Economics), cum laude, from the University of Pretoria. She has been listed as an expert economist by the Global Competition Reviews’ ‘Who’s Who of Competition Lawyers and Economists’ for more than a decade.