According to Mr. LU Yanchun, a Deputy Director of the Price Supervision and Anti-Monopoly Bureau of the National Development and Reform Commission (the “NDRC”), the NDRC is going to tighten up the law enforcement in the industries of aviation (presumably retailing services), everyday chemicals, automobiles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and household electric appliances. 

In the six industries, the least surprising is about pharmaceuticals, telecommunications and automobiles.  For example, in 2011, two pharmaceutical distributors, Shandong Weifang Shuntong Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. and Weifang Huaxin Medicine Trading Co. Ltd., were found to have dramatically raised the price and monopolized the supply of promethazine hydrochloride, a raw material of the compound reserpine, which is a medicine included in China’s essential drug list for high blood pressure treatment.  As a result, the NDRC ordered the two distributors to terminate the exclusive agreements with the concerned manufacturers of promethazine hydrochloride, and imposed fines of RMB 6.877 million (USD 1.08 million) on Shuntong (including confiscated illegal gains of RMB 3.77 million) and RMB 152,600 on Huaxin (including confiscated illegal gains of RMB 52,600). 

Also in 2011, the NDRC publicly announced its investigation of China Telecom and China Unicom, two giant State-owned enterprises, for abuse of their dominant market position in the broadband internet market although there is not any result yet.

As for the automobile industry, Mr. Lu said, as early as one year ago, that the NDRC was going to crack down on automobile competitors from fixing sales prices as well as some other anticompetitive activities related with discount or some other fee arrangements – follow here for the report in Chinese.  However, the NDRC so far did not do anything on any automobile enterprises yet.

It is new to know that the NDRC is going to closely watch the other three industries, namely, aviation, every chemicals and household electric appliances.  It remains to be seen how serious and soon that the NDRC is going to adopt some crack-down measures.  Given the slowness of the NDRC in automobile industry, it is reasonably doubtful that the NDRC would act on the three industries very soon and seriously.  It would be interesting to know why the NDRC has picked up the three industries to have a close look at.  It seems that there are some other industries worthy of more serious monitor such as real restate, banking.