CONTENT
Chapter I Anti-Monopoly Enforcement
1. Trade Associations Became Key Target of Enforcement Against Horizontal Monopoly Agreements
2. Investigation of Horizontal Monopoly Agreements and Unfairly High Prices in the Pharmaceutical Industry
3. Investigation of Practices of Unreasonable Trading Conditions in the Public Utility Industry
4. RPM Remains the Focus of Enforcement While Exemption Rules Need to be Clarified
5. No Poaching Agreements Are Under SAMR's Radar
6. Platform Most-Favored-Nation ("MFN") Clauses Have Attracted Regulatory Attention
7. SAMR Seeks Comments on Guidelines Regarding Standard Essential Patents ("SEP")
Chapter II Merger Control
1. Significantly Increased Turnover Thresholds
2. Merger Control Review Has Become an Important Weapon in Commercial Wars
3. The "Chip War" Continues
Chapter III Antitrust Litigation
1. Courts Upholding Damage Claims Based on Administrative Penalty Decisions
2. The First judgment in China to Recognize a Hub-and-spoke Agreement
3. Further Clarifying Rules for Abuse of Market Dominance
4. Further Clarifying Rules for the Abuse of IPRs
5. Further Clarifying Rules of Jurisdictional Nexus
Chapter IV Administrative Monopoly
Chapter V Anti-unfair Competition in Digital Economy
1. The Draft AUCL Amendments Add New Provisions on Unfair Competition Practices in the Internet Sector
2. Soaring Number of Lawsuits Involving New Types of Unfair Competition Acts in the Digital Economy, with Data Crawling Becoming A Hot Topic
Chapter VI China's National Security Review Regime for Foreign Investment
1. Scope of Transactions Subject to NSR
2. Review Timeline of NSR
3. Conditional Clearance
2023 is the 15th year since China’s Anti-monopoly Law ("AML") became effective, and the first complete year the amendment to the AML in 2022 ("AML Amendment") was implemented.
In 2023, the State Administration for Market Regulation ("SAMR") issued a series of supporting regulations to refine the rules under the AML Amendment. Antitrust enforcement has become increasingly a norm and some new types of behaviors (such as no poaching) have caught attention of SAMR. SAMR also improved the efficiency of merger control review by dividing up work between central and provincial regulators.
Antitrust litigation continued to gain momentum. A number of court decisions have further clarified the antitrust substantive and procedural rules, and covered some new types of issues (such as hub-and-spoke agreements). Multiple civil compensation claims based on administrative penalties were upheld by the courts.
Supervision of acts of unfair competition in the digital economy has increasingly strengthened, and the rules for assessing acts of unfair competition such as traffic hijacking, platform blocking and malicious transactions have been refined. In litigation related to anti-unfair competition, there have emerged many cases related to data crawling.
We have also included a section to introduce China's national security review regime for foreign investment ("NSR"), which remained active in 2023.
In this article, we review the key events in the aforementioned fields in 2023, summarize the experiences and achievements, and look forward to the trend in 2024, with a view to providing useful reference for companies’ competition law compliance in China.
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