Alibaba Hit With Record $2.8 Billion Fine For Antitrust Violations In China

On April 10, 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation ("SAMR"), the national antitrust enforcement agency of China, released its penalty decision against Alibaba, one of the world's largest e-commerce companies. SAMR held that Alibaba has abused its dominant position in China's online retail platform market by a practice called "choose one from two" – punishing merchants who operate online stores both on Alibaba and on its rival platforms or who run promotions at the same time on both platforms. Alibaba was levied a record fine of 18.2 billion CNY (approx. $2.8 billion), which represents 4% of the company's domestic annual sales. The fine exceeds and almost triples China's antitrust fine imposed on Qualcomm in 2015, 6.088 billion CNY, the record keeper before Alibaba. It also comes close to the amount of Google's first antitrust ticket in the European Union for abusing its market dominance of the search engine market in 2017.