The longrunning war between automakers and independent spare parts suppliers has spilt over into Brazil - and with such a major carmaking sector, the surprise is only that it took so long to do so. We are grateful to Greg Aharonian's incendiary but addictive PATNEWS for a link to the December 2010 Business Week article reporting the investigation by the Brazilian antitrust agency, CADE (the Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica), into Ford, Fiat and Volkswagen.
FICPI's 2008 Report on the protection of spare parts (ExCo Florence, Italy, EXCO/IT08/CET/1202, Sep 2008) indicates that a competition agency called SDE issued a pro-automaker decision on March 3, 2008. Labrunie & Columbo comment on that decision towards the end of a thoughtful article here. Is the CADE case an appeal from the SDE decision? Can a reader enlighten us?
In the meantime, anyone with a long memory might recall that the UK Monopolies & Mergers Commission (now the Competition Commission) reported on Ford, finding their conduct in not licensing their spare part IPR to be anticompetitive, as Monopolies and Mergers Commission Report on the Policy and Practice of the Ford Motor Company Limited of not granting licences to manufacture or sell in the UK certain replacement body parts for Ford vehicles, February 1985, Cmnd. 9437. The Competition Commission have published it on their website, should any browsing Brazilian regulators wish to check it out.
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