2023-10-30 06:03:11
The Federal Competition Authority (BWB) has sentenced the Upper Austrian industrial group Fronius and two of its trading partners to high fines for violations of antitrust law. The authority announced this in a broadcast on Sunday. Fronius had entered into anti-competitive contract agreements with the technical trading companies Zultner (Graz) and Haberkorn (Bregenz) in the trading of welding technology products. The penalty for Fronius: three million euros.
Since the Upper Austrian company testified as a key witness, this is a reduced verdict. The cartel court imposed a fine of 870,000 euros on Haberkorn and Zultner has to pay a fine of 550,000 euros. All three companies accepted the court’s decision.
An anonymous tip via the BWB whistleblowing platform got the process rolling in the summer of 2020. Since 2021, Fronius has cooperated “continuously and comprehensively” as a key witness, as the BWB says.
The affected distribution contracts contained “rules that violate antitrust law regarding territorial division with absolute territorial protection, price agreements and non-competition clauses” in transactions between companies (‘business to business’ or ‘B2B’ for short). The investigating authority was also aware of “violations of the antitrust ban, such as price agreements and cover offers,” which went beyond the contractual agreements in question.
According to the BWB, such agreements are prohibited because they distort competition for prices for goods and orders to the disadvantage of other companies. This can happen, for example, if market-dominating companies agree not to undercut each other’s prices or not to get in each other’s way in sales areas.
The BWB had already announced in July that it had submitted an application to the antitrust court to impose a fine against Fronius and other companies that were not named at the time. In this statement, the BWB also defined a possible level of punishment: “If a violation is found, the cartel court can, at the request of the BWB, impose fines of up to 10 percent of the total turnover achieved in the previous financial year.” Fronius generated total sales of around one billion euros in 2022.
Prosecuting and punishing violations of antitrust law has “the highest priority in order to ensure functioning and fair competition,” said the BWB’s interim general director, Natalie Harsdorf-Borsch, as she concluded in Sunday’s broadcast. To do this, her authority observes “every market”, “quickly takes up tips, like here via the BNB whistleblowing system” and follows them up “consistently”.
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