Price-fixing foreign shipping firms fined US$63m
Print Edition
EIGHT foreign shipping firms have been found guilty of breaking China’s antitrust law, with seven of them fined a combined 407 million yuan (US$62.9 million), the country’s top pricing authority said yesterday.
The eight — Japan’s NYK Line, “K” Line, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and Eastern Car Liner, Chile’s CSAV and CCNI, South Korea’s Eukor and Norway’s Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics — were found guilty of fixing prices for car carrier services for more than four years, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement.
Seven of them — excluding NYK Line — were fined between 4 and 9 percent of their income from the sector in 2014.
The respective fines reflected the companies’ degree of involvement in the crime and willingness to cooperate with the NDRC’s yearlong investigation, the statement said. On that basis, NYK Line escaped without a financial penalty, it said.
All eight were found to have colluded on pricing and allocation of contracts, the statement said, adding that the price fixing affected a wide range of routes across China, North and South America, and Europe.
They exchanged critical price information, discussed bidding plans and arranged clients and routes, the commission said.
The NDRC has vowed to crack down on monopoly cases across all industries. In October it said it had imposed fines of 6.6 billion yuan in 10 anti-trust cases since the start of the year. The vast majority of that came in February, when mobile chip titan Qualcomm was hit with a 6.1 billion yuan fine, the largest such penalty ever imposed in China.
In 2014, Chrysler, Audi and 12 Japanese companies were fined a combined 1.2 billion yuan after falling foul of the country’s antitrust laws.
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