On July 6, 2017, the Compliance Working Group held a lecture event in Munich on the topic of M&A transactions in China. Adrian Emch, partner in the antitrust law department of the law firm Hogan Lovells in Beijing, gave an overview of the process of company acquisitions in China. He focused on compliance issues, in particular antitrust compliance.
Mr. Emch first gave an overview of the Chinese competition and antitrust authorities – NDRC (National Development and Reform Commission), MOFCOM (Ministry of Commerce) and SAIC (State Administration for Industry & Commerce) – and their respective responsibilities.
In connection with typical compliance aspects of a due diligence, Mr. Emch particularly addressed the necessity of forming so-called “clean teams” for the analysis of information relevant to competition law. It must be ensured that, in particular, the sales team of a corporate buyer does not receive any information about customers and pricing of the Chinese target company that is not publicly accessible during the due diligence phase.
Merger control proceedings can be very time-consuming in China. The decision criteria and their application by MOFCOM are often not as clear as those involved in M&A transactions in Europe are used to.
The event participants contributed their own experiences on the individual points and discussed them animatedly with the speaker Adrian Emch.
