Clifford Chance
Antitrust in China and across the region: Quarterly Update October to December 2016
11 January 2017
Key points of interest include the following:
- Latest merger control stats from China – MOFCOM finished the year with its second conditional approval of 2016 (Abbott/St Jude) out of over 350 cases reviewed. Continuing a trend from previous quarters, MOFCOM also issued a fine for failure to notify – the point of interest in this case (Canon/Toshiba Medical Systems) being that the parties had used a warehousing structure to enable the Seller to sell off its interest prior to the antitrust review process. That structure had earned a mild rebuke (but no fine) from the Japanese competition authority earlier in the year, but led to a penalty of RMB 300,000 (USD 43,000) in China.
- In terms of antitrust enforcement within China, the last quarter of 2016 was very busy by recent standards with over a dozen decisions issued. Of particular note were SAIC's RMB 667 million (USD 97 million) fine on Tetra Pak for abuse of dominance and two RPM cases led by NDRC on Medtronic (RMB 118 million) and GM's Chinese affiliate (RMB 201 million) respectively. The Tetra Pak fine was by far the largest SAIC has ever issued and the decision (an impressive 58 pages) contains a detailed analysis of Tetra Pak's rebate structure. The remaining cases were primarily directed at domestic companies, with NDRC issuing three decisions involving public agencies for breach of administrative monopoly.
- Outside China, South Korea's Fair Trade Commission issued its largest ever fine (KRW 1 trillion or USD 850 million) against Qualcomm for abuse of dominance. Australia continued its track record of enforcement with a second criminal case being brought against shipping company K-Line. In a separate Australian case, a fine was also imposed on banks ANZ and Macquarie for allegedly attempting to fix the benchmark rate for the Malaysian ringgit. Interestingly, the conduct in that case took place in Singapore between Singapore-based individuals.
