Clifford Chance

Antitrust in China and across the region: Quarterly Update April to June 2021

August 5, 2021

Last quarter saw the Chinese antitrust authority (SAMR)'s continuing momentum to rein in home grown tech firms ––"Choose one from two", after becoming a grave pain to Alibaba group, has not only invited a fine to Sherpa's, which is an online food delivery platform serving English speaking residents in Shanghai, but also prompted a formal investigation into Meituan, a renowned tech platform that originally focused on online food delivery business in China Softer yet innovative measures are in the meanwhile jointly taken by SAMR and cyber security authority towards most of the sizable online platforms in China, with the latter demanded to publicly commit to not engaging in anti competitive conduct On merger control front, the fire over Chinese tech firms' historical failure to file transactions has further spread, with another nine decisions published by SAMR, notably catching acquisitions of minority interest as low as 6.67%.

With the tech/platform wave going on, it was surprising to see that the last quarter has not experienced delay in clearing merger control cases on the part of the shorted handed SAMR On the contrary, there was a significant increase in the number of cleared cases, with 145 cases unconditionally cleared and Danfoss' acquisition of Eaton's hydraulic business cleared subject to divestures Further, a noteworthy penalty decision was made against Yangtze River Pharma's resale price maintenance behaviours which were fined approx. USD 117 million by SAMR.

Outside China mainland, in Japan reports were published on competition policy in data market and digital advertising market in Korea dawn raids were conducted against Google and Facebook and Samsung's affiliates were fined for unfair competition in Taiwan Google's investigation ended without abusive findings in Australia the competition authority adopted a new organisational structure, introduced first class exemption for collective bargaining and was granted leave to appear in Epic v Apple appeal in Vietnam the annual report on competition law enforcements in 2020 was published and in India the competition authority's orders to probe WhatsApp, Amazon and Flipkart were supported before courts.

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