Clifford Chance

Antitrust in China and Across the Region

25 April 2024

QUARTERLY UPDATE

January to March 2024

The long-awaited amendments to the Chinese merger filing thresholds were finally published and came into formal effect on 26 January 2024. As the China-wide turnover thresholds doubled, with the individual test increased from RMB 400 million to RMB 800 million and the combined test increased from RMB 2 billion to RMB 4 billion, SAMR anticipated a 30% reduction in the number of merger filings in the coming year. A key question that calls for official clarification is whether the new thresholds apply to transactions which were signed before 26 January but not closed by then. Consultations with SAMR on a case-by-case basis would be recommended to mitigate uncertainties arising from this gap. On the conduct side, industry associations were apparently in the crosshairs. At the enforcement level, another local car dealing industry association and its members were penalised for coordinating and implementing cartels, respectively. Within court rooms, China's Supreme Court overruled a first-instance judgment in favour of Hitachi Metals by broadening the product market definition with respect to patented sintered NdFeB magnets. Separately, the Intellectual Property Court in its 2023 annual report shed useful light upon the approach to assessing complex antitrust issues, such as tech-antitrust cases and hub-and-spoke agreements.

Outside China, antitrust authorities across the region were busy with merger control. In the digital sector, Google appeared to have become a common target. Authorities were also mulling over better antitrust tools towards digital players, e.g., India proposed a Digital Competition Act to introduce ex-ante regulation. Other significant developments in this quarter include: Singapore rolled out a new foreign investment review regime, which is expected to come into force later this year; antitrust authorities in Hong Kong and Guangdong province co-published the Competition Compliance Manual for Businesses in Guangdong and Hong Kong; and Australia released the country's competition compliance and enforcement priorities for 2024/25, highlighting unfair contract terms, misleading ESG claims, digital economy, industries in focus, etc.

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