Authored by Dr. Zhan Hao (zhanhao@anjielaw.com) and Song Ying (songying@anjielaw.com) at AnJie Law Firm
I. Legislation
A. Legislation Tendency Highlight
- In the year of 2015, China’s antitrust enforcement agencies, namely the National Development and Reform Commission (“NDRC”), the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (“SAIC”) and the Ministry of Commerce (“MOFCOM”) made more efforts regarding legislation, especially when it comes to strengthening the role of soft law, compared to 2014.
- Intellectual property right (“IPR”) related antitrust issues are a hot topic. At this stage, three antitrust enforcement bodies and the State Intellectual Property Office are respectively drafting the IPR antitrust guidelines based on their respective enforcement areas and are going to submit their respective guidelines to the State Council’s Anti-monopoly Commission (“AMC”). The AMC will eventually come up with the final and unified guidelines (the “IPR Antitrust Guidelines”) based on the draft versions submitted by above-mentioned bodies.
- The auto industry has consistently attracted attention under the framework of AML. Apart from continuous enforcement activities against cartel, vertical monopolistic agreement and abusing dominance in the auto industry, the antitrust guidelines for the auto industries being drafted by NDRC (the “Auto Industry Antitrust Guidelines”), are the only antitrust guidelines specialized for a particular industry. This suggests a deepening and detailing of legislative activities of China’s antitrust enforcement authorities.
- In addition to the IPR Antitrust Guidelines and the Auto Industry Antitrust Guidelines, the NDRC has also drafted four other guidelines in 2015 in order to normalize and guide the enforcement activities. The four guidelines include Guidelines on Leniency Policy, Guidelines on Commitment of Undertakings, Guidelines on Calculating the Illegal Gains and Fines for Monopoly Conducts and Guidelines on Procedures of Monopolistic agreement Exemption.
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