Antitrust risk map: Perspective from Asia

We see a lot of diversity. That is a clear trend and it hasn’t changed for certainly five to ten years, no real convergence across the region, you can see the Chinese developing their rules, the Koreans and Japanese relying on a very significant body of precedent that was long established.

You can see the newer competition law regimes in the South, in the Asian region that are developing according to local needs and local market conditions. So, you see common goal principles similar to what you would see across the world, but you see these principles being interpreted and implemented against very different market conditions – it’s really a patchwork of different markets and different enforcement priorities.

When we speak to our clients, the common theme is that they cannot adopt a one-size-fits-all strategy, they cannot simply take their internal protocols, internal guidelines, those perhaps well tested and well developed internal protocols that they would be using in the EU or in the US or in Australia, and simply roll them out. That is because of the diversity in the legal regimes, but also, the different cultures, the different degrees of awareness that different markets have, so, in our experience, there is clearly a distinctive advantage to starting with these international best practices but these need to be adjusted to the local needs of the local markets and local cultures.

So, the global Antirust Risk map provides a graphical presentation of that diversity that we were just discussing and it allows compliance counsel or regional counsel with easy access to a first snapshot of the degree of enforcement, the enforcement history, the aggressiveness of competition authorities, the types of issues that competition authorities are typically looking into and the procedures that these authorities would use in investigating.  So, that provides a first response very quickly to this difficult, almost a maze that Asia represents to multinational companies active across the region.