Korea’s Recent Enforcement Trends of Cartel Law

CPI Asia Column edited by Vanessa Yanhua Zhang (Global Economics Group) present:

Korea’s Recent Enforcement Trends of Cartel Law – By Sinsung (Sean) Yun, Kenneth T. Kim
& Yang Jin Park¹ (Yoon & Yang, LLC)

Introduction

Korea’s Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act (the “MRFTA”) regulates, among others, abuse of market dominance, anticompetitive business combinations of enterprisers, unfair collaborative acts (i.e., cartels), unfair trade practices and resale price maintenance as the main types of violations. Some notable trends in 2015 concerning the Korea Fair Trade Commission (the “KFTC”)’s enforcement of the MRFTA include the following: in regard to abuse of market dominance, the KFTC’s cautious stance since the 2008 Posco decision, which declared stringent requirements for establishing anticompetitiveness, has been maintained, and in regard to business combinations of enterprisers, the KFTC has actively exercised its investigative authority in large-scale global transactions, such as the examination of the merger between Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron which was concluded due to the withdrawal by the filing party and the case of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s mobile handset division, which was the first business combination case to be concluded based on a consent decree order. Further, by amending the Guidelines for Examination of Unfair Trade Practices (the “UTP Guidelines”) on December 31, 2015, the KFTC specified the determin