The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has conducted antitrust investigations, concluding that Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart repeatedly violated local antitrust laws, while Samsung and Xiaomi colluded with them.
As reported by Reuters, the smartphone companies Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Realme, OnePlus, and others have been accused of anti-competitive behaviour, along with Amazon and Flipkart, by the Indian watchdog.
Antitrust investigations of CCI revealed that Amazon and Flipkart violated local competition laws. Namely, the two e-commerce leaders are allegedly accused of giving preference to select sellers, including the abovementioned smartphone producers, prioritising certain listings, and steeply discounting chosen products instead of fairly displaying the products of all their business customers.
In addition, CCI findings state that both Amazon and Flipkart used their foreign investments to provide subsidised rates for services like warehousing and marketing to select sellers in India. The report revealed names of some of the popular brands involved in uncompetitive practices.
Thus, Indian units of Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Realme and OnePlus were allegedly “involved in the practice of exclusive” phone launches in “collusion” with Amazon and its affiliates, stated the investigation findings exclusively seen by Reuters. Meanwhile, Indian units of Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Vivo, Lenovo, and Realme conducted similar practices on the Flipkart platform.
Exclusive launches had not only severely affected the ordinary sellers on the platform but also negatively impacted the brick-and-mortar retailers who received mobile phones at a much later date, both CCI reports concluded upon analysing relevant data from smartphone companies.
Samsung and Xiaomi are two of India’s biggest smartphone players, jointly contributing to almost 36% of India’s market share.
A few years ago, Amazon was hit by antitrust charges in the EU, being accused of abusing non-public data from third-party merchants to boost sales of its own brands in France and Germany. The Central Bank of India also fined the Indian division of Amazon Pay for ignoring the guidelines for the use of digital wallets and the rules for identifying counterparties last year.
