A rare agreement given the scale of the players involved. No less than twelve companies in the household appliances sector were singled out by the Competition Authority on Thursday, December 19, for having participated in a vertical cartel in setting the sales prices of products sold in stores.
Ten manufacturers – BSH (Bosch, Siemens, etc.), Candy Hoover, Eberhardt, Electrolux, Whirlpool (as successor to Indesit acquired in 2014), LG, Miele, SEB, Smeg, Whirlpool – and two distributors – Boulanger and Darty – were implicated for individual agreements which “were implemented between February 2007 and December 2014 and aimed to maintain higher sales prices, particularly in the face of the emergence of competing online distributors”indicated the competition watchdog. They were sanctioned with fines ranging from 100,000 euros for Eberhardt (brands Asko, Falmec and Gessi, and formerly Liebherr) to 189.5 million euros for SEB, for a total amount of 611 million euros.
In a context marked by the boom in online sales at the end of the 2000s, particularly for small and large household appliances, this agreement was intended to maintain artificially high sales prices. It has, according to the administrative authority, harmed consumers, but has also “contributed to weakening the distribution sector, by strengthening the weight of the main existing players (…), the vast majority (around 95%) of distributors present online at the start of the practices have disappeared or been bought by traditional distributors”.
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