Spain has slapped Apple and Amazon with a massive fine for collusion in the sale of products.
The country’s competition watchdog, CNMC, on July 17th announced fines of €194 million ($218 million) between the two tech giants for unfair competition practices.
The regulator said in a statement that the two firms had agreed to limit the sale of Apple products by third parties on Amazon’s Spanish websites. Under the terms of a 2018 contract between the two companies, only resellers picked by Apple were approved by Amazon to sell Apple products on the online retailer’s website.
“Over 90 percent of resellers who used Amazon’s website in Spain to sell Apple products were excluded from Spain’s main online market,” the statement explained.
The regulator added that it considered the concession as having “drastically” reduced competition on Amazon’s Spanish platform resulting in an increase in the prices of Apple devices sold on Amazon.
Amazon was fined €50.5 million and Apple €143.6 million.
The companies said the agreement was meant to ensure that all Apple products sold on Amazon were authentic, as a number of counterfeit products had been discovered, but the regulator did not find that the company’s claims of fraudulent products justified the restrictions.
“The two companies without justificaion restricted the number of sellers of Apple products on the Amazon website in Spain,” CNMC said.
The companies have two months to appeal the decision, and Apple said it would challenge the regulator’s ruling.
“To protect users from security, safety, and quality risks created by counterfeit products, we have rules in place that have effectively reduced counterfeiting,” a company spokesperson told AFP.
The AFP also reports that other tech giants have been fined multiple times in recent years in Europe for engaging in unfair competition. It cites the examples of Italy and France, which fined Amazon €1.1 billion in December 2021 for abusing its dominant market position, and Apple €371.6 million in October 2022, respectively.
