Lawyers of Arzinger Law Office represent interests of the world’s biggest DIY hypermarket chain operator in an unfair competition investigation of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU).   

The key competitor of our client, a known player on the market of DIY (“Do it yourself!”) hypermarkets, filed an application to AMCU alleging unfair comparative advertisement on the part of our client. Upon examination of this application AMCU required our client to provide information about procedure and format of marketing events in course of which, according to the competitor of our client, such illegal comparative advertisement took place. During preparation of answers and documents for the AMCU’s request lawyers of Arzinger developed a clear legal position that proves justification and admissibility of applied marketing strategies and conducted marketing events of our client in respect to adherence to the requirements of the competition and intellectual property rights protection laws. Moreover, in order to provide AMCU with possibility to conduct a more comprehensive and complex study of the comparative advertisement problematic on this market, lawyers of Arzinger submitted to the Committee information and proofs of comparative advertisements made by the competitor of our client, where the competitor of our client used advertisement slogans about low prices and some other questionable marketing methods that could mislead consumers and are assumed to be unfair advertisement within the meaning of the competition legislation.  

Timur Bondaryev, Managing Partner and co-head of the Antitrust and Competition Practice at Arzinger, comments on the project: “It should be understood that participants of the market of DIY hypermarkets, which is very narrow in Ukraine, can effectively compete with each other only in terms of price. Consumers on this market are attracted, first of all, by the price, all other conditions (quality of goods, services etc.) being equal. A comparative advertisement, provided adherence to requirements as to its form and content, is in this aspect nearly the most effective way to inform consumers about company’s competitive advantages compared to its competitors – offered price for similar commodity. Obtaining objective information on current prices of the biggest DIY operators a consumer gets a number of benefits and advantages, first of all, reducing costs for search of information about the price, sellers etc. We regret that a number of Ukrainian companies that cannot effectively compete with new market players, in particular, the biggest foreign operators, try to use such leverage mechanisms as applications to antitrust authorities with knowingly unjustified allegations in violation of competition laws. We hope that AMCU will objectively analyze this situation and carefully study all of our arguments stated in the answer to the informational request, as well as give a duly evaluation of groundless claims of the competitor of our client. Still, having this situation for an example, foreign companies shall be prepared that their less effective Ukrainian competitors would descend to not quite clean or ethical competition methods, including initiation of questionable antitrust inspections and investigations”. 

Legal support of this project was provided by Oleksander Dyakulych (Associate of the Antitrust and Competition Practice) and Anton Polikarpov (Associate of the IP Rights Practice) under the supervision of Timur Bondaryev, Managing Partner and co-head of the Antitrust and Competition Practice at Arzinger.