Hong Kong’s Competition Commission calls on trade groups to avoid opaque, onerous membership policies
- Commission CEO Rasul Butt says recent cases have raised concerns about the admission criteria and procedures of certain associations
- Membership in trade bodies is, in some cases, essential to entering a market, so unreasonable admission practices can hurt competition
Hong Kong’s Competition Commission on Thursday urged the city’s trade associations to review their membership admission practices and ensure they were following the regulator’s guidelines to avoid breaching antitrust laws.
In a statement, the commission noted that membership in an association was, in some cases, an essential precondition for participating in a market, so unreasonable and unjustifiably strict admission criteria and procedures could be harmful to companies looking to enter a given industry.
Exclusion from membership, it added, could also deprive a business or individual of accreditation, government subsidies and other advantages that were only available to members.
Commission CEO Rasul Butt said his colleagues had recently encountered some cases that raised concerns about the admission criteria and procedures of certain associations.
He also warned that when facilitating interactions between competitors, authorities had to take care to avoid giving rise to anticompetitive arrangements.
