Trade Associations concerned about draft Commission guidelines on the applicability of Article 101 to horizontal co-operation agreements - Competitive assessment of information exchange

Orgalime, together with other industry associations, issued a joint position paper on the Commission’s draft guidelines on the applicability of Article 101 (information exchange).

Trade associations are highly worried about the new draft guidelines concerning information exchange. We fear that our work on statistics - concerning the economic climate in a specific industry sector - would in future become very problematic under competition law and that many industry associations might be forced to discontinue producing such statistics.

The trade associations asked the Commission to be more precise in its guidelines, especially concerning data on sales, the age of data and data on costs.