On May 10 and 19, 2023, the Shanghai Administration for Market Regulation[2] and the Beijing Administration for Market Regulation[3] announced the launch of special actions for anti-unfair competition law enforcement in the cities respectively. Such special law enforcement actions will be centered around three key points: (i) to investigate and deal with Internet unfair competition and to investigate and strike hard the unfair competition activities such as click farming and live sales of counterfeit products in order to escort the development of the digital economy; (ii) to focus on regulating the marketing behaviors concerning people’s livelihood, to strengthen the supervision of new types of commercial marketing behaviors, and to strike commercial bribery in key industries such as the sale of medicine, catering and tourism, etc.; (iii) to focus on the protection of the core competitiveness of enterprises and to strengthen the protection of trade secrets, business logos and business reputation.
On May 16, 2023, the SAMR released the Antitrust Guidelines on Industry Associations (Draft for Comments) seeking public comments[4]. The guidelines enumerate three types of high-risk behaviors that industry associations should avoid engaging in, including: (i) promoting sensitive information exchange, discussion or communication among undertakings within the industry; (ii) publishing prices that have guiding effects like guidance prices, benchmark prices, reference prices, recommended prices, forecast prices, or publishing price calculation formulas for the reference of undertakings in the industry; and (iii) publishing inaccurate or exaggerated cost trends, supply and demand conditions and other market information. At the same time, the guidelines specify the requirements and measures of self-compliance for industry associations, legal liabilities for engaging in monopolistic behaviors, and the corresponding credit disciplinary system, etc.
On May 31, 2023, the General Office of the State Council issued its legislative action plan for the year of 2023[5], with actions planned including revision of the Rules of the State Council on Declaration Threshold for Concentration of Undertakings, and submission of the draft revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress for consideration.
On June 9, 2023, the SAMR released the Annual Report on China’s Antitrust Enforcement (2022)[6]. The report shows that in 2022, the antitrust law enforcement authorities have handled and closed 187 monopoly cases with a total confiscation and penalty amount of RMB 784 million, cleared 794 merger cases including 5 conditional clearance cases, and by doing so, the antitrust law enforcement authorities have strongly maintained the fair competition in the market and promoted the continuous optimization of a market-oriented, rule of law based and international business environment.
On June 15, 2023, the SAMR announced the deployment of the special actions on optimizing platform agreements[7], which will last for five-month and be implemented in four phases including mobilization and deployment, platform self-examination, local guidance and rectification, and SAMR’s assessment. Such special actions focus on large platform enterprises operating business closely related to consumers’ daily life, and urge and guide the platform enterprises to conduct a comprehensive self-examination of their agreements. For some of the platform agreements that are missing key provisions, the special actions propose to instruct the platform enterprises to supplement and improve the terms, focusing on the protection of the rights and interests of undertakings within the platform, consumer rights protection and other key aspects. In doing this, the special actions propose to give full play to the role of expert review committee on contract supervision, specifically, organize the key business persons and legal experts to conduct centralized review on the platform agreements, prepare the issue list and timely sending feedback to the platform enterprises. Further under the special actions, the authorities will facilitate the modification and refinement of the platform agreements with the platform enterprises in accordance with the issue list, eventually aiming to effectively protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers, undertakings in the platform and other parties.
On June 19, 2023, the SAMR issued the Antitrust Compliance Guidelines on Concentration of Undertakings (Draft for Comments) [8]for public comments. The draft guidelines are specialized in the field of concentration of undertakings as addition to the Antitrust Compliance Guidelines for Undertakings. The undertakings may establish a specific antitrust compliance system of concentration of undertakings with reference to such guidelines based on their own circumstances such as business scale, management mode, frequency of concentration and compliance system, or incorporate relevant compliance elements of concentration of undertakings into their existing antitrust compliance management system.
On June 29, 2023, the SAMR issued the Provisions on Prohibiting Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights to Eliminate or Restrict Competition (“Provisions”)[9], which will take effect from August 1, 2023. Compared to the Provisions on Prohibiting Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights to Eliminate or Restrict Competition promulgated in 2015, the Provisions focus on the following aspects: (i) expanding the scope of “exclude and restrict competition by abusing intellectual property rights”, covering monopoly agreements and abuse of market dominance through exercising intellectual property rights, and concentration of undertakings that has or may have competitive concerns; (ii) refining the rules for determining monopolistic behaviors through exercising intellectual property rights in accordance with the amended Anti-Monopoly Law (2022). More specifically, improving and refining the rules for relevant market definition, the determination and presumption of market dominance, the identification of relevant monopolistic behaviors, and the factors to be considered in merger review and the specific types of restrictive conditions, with the characteristics of intellectual property rights and regulatory practice taken into account; and (iii) strengthening the regulation of typical and special monopolistic behaviors in the intellectual property field, such as engaging in monopolistic actions through patent consortia and by consortia members, market dominantor using standard essential patents to implement “patent hijacking”, and etc.
On June 30, 2023, the SAMR issued the Anti-monopoly Guideline for the Standard Essential Patent Field (“Draft for Comments”)[10] seeking public comments. The Draft for Comments proposes to provide guidance on the concepts, analytical principles, methods for relevant market definition, information disclosure rules, guidance on licensing commitments and good-faith negotiations of Standard Essential Patents (“SEPs”). It also sets out the specific circumstances and factors to be considered when determining illegal conducts achieved through the formulation and implementation of SEPs, such as monopoly agreements, licensing SEPs at unfairly high prices, refusal to licensing SEPs, tie-in sales related to SEPs, imposing other unfair transaction terms, differential treatment, and abuse of remedies, etc.