The Competition Law aims to protect and encourage fair competition, and to combat and prevent monopolistic practices that affect lawful competition or consumer interest, for improving the market environment and promoting economic growth.

Provisions of the Law shall be applicable to all the entities and grouped entities (including electronic platforms) carrying out economic activities within Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and to any behavior or practice of entity outside KSA but having impact on domestic competition. However, the Law does not apply to wholly owned State establishments or companies.

Following activities are prohibited under the law:

• Prohibited agreements/arrangements among competing entities;
• Abuse of dominant position by entities dominant in the relevant market; and
• Economic concentration which is likely to create dominant entity.

Prohibitions apply to all actions, including agreements, contracts, arrangements, and understandings between entities, whether expressed or implied, written or spoken, if their purpose or impact is to harm competition. The following practices agreed upon by competing entities are considered anti-competitive:

• Increasing, decreasing or fixing prices;
• Setting production quantities, weight and size of good;
• Restricting the free flow of goods and services;
• Creating barriers to entry for competing entities;
• Preventing entities from accessing goods or services available in the market;
• Dividing markets for the sale or purchase of goods and services;
• Freezing or limiting the manufacturing, development, distribution, marketing or investment activities; and
• Colluding or coordinating in bids or offers;

When an entity or group of entities attains a market share of 40% or has the ability to control market prices, they should be careful in their dealing in such a way that dominant position can-not be abused. The following practice of the dominant entities shall be considered, per se, violation:

• Below cost pricing;
• Imposing prices and terms of resale of goods or services;
• Creating artificial abundance or shortage;
• Discriminating among entities under similar contracts;
• Requiring an entity to refrain from dealing with another entity; and
• Imposing supplementary obligation which by nature or according to commercial usage have no connection with the subject commodity.

Entities that plan to participate in economic concentration and have a combined sales value exceeding SAR 200 million are required by law to submit a pre-approval application with General Authority of Competition (GAC) at least 90 days prior to completion of the merger transaction. However, the Authority’s Board of Directors (the board) shall issue decision concerning an economic concentration, which could be approval, conditional approval or rejection.

The Board may, upon a recommendation from a Technical Committee formed for the purpose, approve a formal application submitted by any entity for exemption from the restrictions on anti-competitive behavior. An exemption will only be granted if it would improve market performance or the entity’s performance in relation to product quality, technological development, or efficiency, provided that the benefits realized by consumers as a result of the exemption are considered to outweigh any negative impact on the free competition.

The law provides leniency or settlement under which any violator of the provisions of law making a full and true disclosure in respect of the alleged violation may avail the opportunity of non-initiation of proceedings or acceptance of settlement by the violator benefiting from the violation to pay fine determined by GAC Board.

Any person violating provisions of the Law (anticompetitive agreements, abuse of dominant position and economic concentration) shall be subject to fine not exceeding 10% of the total value of the annual sales or a fine not exceeding 10 million riyals if it is not feasible to estimate the annual sales. The technical Committee may, at its discretion, impose a fine not exceeding three times of the gains the violator earned from the violation. Any person that may withhold information or provide misleading information to GAC shall be subject to fine not exceeding 5% of the total value of the annual sales or a fine not exceeding 5 million riyals if it is not feasible to estimate the annual sales.

We provide wide range of services covering every aspect of the Competition Law to safeguard the business interests of our clients. We provide high quality professional services in this area ranging from advising our valued clients ways and means to comply with the relevant provisions of the law, protecting their interests through invoking the provisions of the law and pleading their case before the GAC to avoid any adverse action against our clients. Our services in this regard includes, but not limited to the following:

We provide following services in cases of Anti-competitive Agreements & Abuse of Dominant Position:

• Assisting our client facing competition law violation proceedings by GAC.
• Preparation of defense/response, based upon commercial, economic and legal justifications, to notification in cases of allegation of entering into anti-competitive agreement or formation of cartel or abuse of dominant position.
• Representing our clients in meetings before the GAC.
• Assisting clients if GAC desires review of any information, documents, data or statements.
• Actively pursuing the case till final decision by the GAC.
• In case of adverse order passed by GAC, assist client in filing of appeal before the court of jurisdiction.

We provide following services in cases of Economic Concentration:

• Assessment of economic concentration based on relevant indicators applied by the GAC.
• Assisting clients in compilation of data, information and documents required to be attached with application of economic concentration
• Preparation of a comprehensive and convincing case on behalf of and in close coordination with clients.
• Filing written application of economic concentration case with the GAC.
• Actively pursuing and pleading the case with GAC, till GAC Board give approval to economic concentration
• Obtaining decision of approval from the GAC.

We provide enterprises following services in seeking exemption from application of certain provision of the Law from the GAC:

• Preparation of application to get exclusion from GAC Board for our clients who have entered into or likely to enter into some agreements, which, prima facie, may be containing prohibited clauses attracting Article 5,6 & 7 of the Law.
• Compilation and preparation of documents that are required to be attached with the exemption application
• Actively pursuing the application with GAC, till final decision issued by the GAC Board.
• Obtaining decision from GAC regarding exemption from the application of provisions of Article 5, 6 and 7 of the Law.

We are committed to ensure that all of the activities of our clients are conducted in accordance with relevant competition law. Get a competition compliance policy for your company at an effective cost.

We also conduct competition compliance audit of our clients’ entity to identify the risky areas which may attract competition violation proceedings and penalties. With this service, we safeguard the business interest of our clients and make them aware of the ways and means to fully comply with the Competition Law and regulations.

Our company conducts competition compliance training for its clients operating in different markets taking into consideration the unique structures and conditions of each market. Therefore, entity specific interactive session is designed for the clients wherein questions of staff are answered instantly, possible weakness of the entity in competition law compliance are identified and solutions are suggested.

Our company designs entity’s specific Competition Law Compliance Manual which would serve as a guideline for entity so that Top Management itself may easily carry out assessment of different business matters to avoid any competition violations. Generally, Competition Authorities give weight to the entity’s self-compliance efforts (Competition Law Compliance Audit, Competition Law Training and Competition Law Manual) in case of any proceeding against the entity. Therefore, any investment on entity’s self-compliance efforts pay dividend in terms of safe guard against damage to goodwill, besides monetary loss in the shape of fine.