Clifford Chance

Asia Pacific Quarterly Antitrust Briefing - July to September 2022

17 October 2022

With the Amended Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) coming into force on 1 August 2022, China saw continuing efforts made to strengthen its overall antitrust enforcement in the past quarter. With respect to merger control, the central antitrust authority (the SAMR) officially announced the delegation of the merger control review power to five local antitrust authorities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Chongqing and Shaanxi. The SAMR also published a landmark decision to conditionally approve the proposed JV deal between Shanghai Airport and China Eastern Air Logistics, which marked China's first intervention with a transaction which involves purely Chinese companies. In addition, scrutiny over failure-to-file transactions in the digital economy remained a focus. It remains to be seen how the SAMR in its future enforcement will implement the lifted penalty regime for failure-to-file cases as provided in the amended AML. Separately, on the conduct side, the SAMR and its local counterparts enforced against (i) five horizontal anti-competitive agreements; (ii) two resale price maintenance (RPM) cases, and (iii) three abuse of dominance cases. Furthermore, it was announced that the SAMR had been recruiting to expand its antitrust manpower. On the private litigation front, an interesting development was that the Supreme Court shed useful light upon the approach to assessing collective market dominance in practice.

Outside China, competition authorities in the region remained dedicated to dealing with challenges arising from the digital economy, especially in relation to big tech firms. In other industries, anti-competitive agreements, in particular cartel and RPM, were actively enforced across the region. On the legislation and policy making side, Australia was considering increasing penalties for certain anti-competitive behaviours; Hong Kong amended leniency policy for individuals to further facilitate the discovery of cartel; the interim chair of the competition authority in the Philippines outlined enforcement priorities for the second half of 2022, and South Korea appointed a new chairperson.

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