Antitrust watchdog fines tech a fresh $3.4 million

Think of any major Chinese tech company, and there’s a high chance they were burned in the latest round of punishments (in Chinese) by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR):

• Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, Meituan, Didi, and ByteDance committed 43 antitrust violations in total, most often by failing to notify regulators that they’d reached a certain market concentration after making acquisitions.
• The companies are listed in order of how much they were fined, from 6.5 million yuan ($1 million) to 500,000 yuan ($78,242).

The context: The latest round of fines represents the culmination of the SAMR’s rapid growth in stature and power ever since it was born from a 2018 merger of three antitrust enforcers. Last month, after Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 elevated the importance of trust busting (in Chinese), the agency has been on a hiring binge:

• A day after Xi’s speech, the SAMR began its first public recruitment for the brand-new Anti-Monopoly Bureau, posting 33 civil service jobs for next year’s intake.
• Last week, SAMR Deputy Minister Gān Lín 甘霖 earned a promotion to lead the new bureau. Before entering government in 2001, she was a professor and policymaker on agriculture.

The takeaway: None of the latest penalties come close to the record 18.2 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) fine Alibaba received in April, or even Meituan’s $527 million fine last month. But they demonstrate the SAMR’s growing confidence. More fines are all but guaranteed.