Clifford Chance
Asia-Pacific Quarterly Antitrust Briefing - Q1 2022
13 April 2022
As the old Chinese saying goes,goes,"a year's plan starts to be made from spring" The first quarter of 2022 saw plans for the country made at different levels, and antitrust remained an essential part of all those plans, including the agenda of the 2022 National People's Congress, the 2021 2022 Annual Governmental Work Report and the State Council's plan to promote a modernised system of market regulation Posing challenges to competition authorities in the EU and the US, the digital economy has also increasingly become a focus of the Chinese antirust authority and its high stakes were reflected i on the one hand in the new National Anti Monopoly Bureau's organisational structure (where each of the three sub bureaus created a standalone division to cover the digital economy) and ( on the other hand, in the unremitting clampdown on digital platforms' 13 failure to file transactions Once again, the majority of the fined transactions involved minority investments, which can never be overlooked when it comes to Chinese merger control.
Also in the past quarter, China subjected two high profile transactions GlobalWafers acquisition of Siltronic and Advanced Micro Devices' acquisition of Xilinx) to conditions Notably, both of these transactions were approved without conditions in a number of other jurisdictions As regards conduct enforcement, water supply, medical device and driving training services were the three sectors hardest hit by antitrust fines On top of these, the past quarter saw an interesting private litigation case where a mediation agreement entered into to settle a patent dispute was eventually ruled by the Supreme Court to have constituted a cartel arrangement.
Outside China, the digital economy has borne the brunt of antitrust scrutiny Japan nodded through Apple's revised App Store rules South Korea's amended enforcement decree of the Telecommunications Business Act became effective and a set of guidelines for antitrust review in the platform sector were released India investigated Google's AdTech for abuse of dominance the Australian competition authority joined forces with other governmental agencies for better collaboration in regulating digital platforms Taiwan released its draft White Paper on the digital economy for public comment and Hong Kong investigated two online food delivery platforms Foodpanda and Deliveroo) for their allegedly anti competitive conduct.
Separately,on the policy side, it is noteworthy that Australia embarked on ex post merger review for historical non opposed mergers and set antitrust compliance and enforcement priorities for the next two years the Philippines' competition authority released its 2021 report and in New Zealand, the ban on misuse of market power was reformed under new legislation.
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