OREANDA-NEWS. September 06, 2010. Comes into force No.222 Order of The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) “On Approving the Procedures for Analyzing the State of Competition on Goods Markets” of 28th April 2010, reported the press-centre of FAS Russia.

The Order was registered by the Russian Ministry of Justice on 2nd August 2010.

Issuing a new version of the “Procedures for Analyzing the State of Competition on Goods Markets” is necessary due to the changes to the antimonopoly law and importance to incorporate modern trends and achievements in development and improvement of the tools for market analysis.

To ensure unified interpretation of some key concepts used in analysis of the state of competition on the markets, the Order clarifies several wordings and some provisions are considerably simplified. In particular, the procedures for the “hypothetical monopolist test” are explained in more clear terms (Clauses 3.9 and 4.6).

The number of cases, when some of the states of the analysis of the state of competition on a goods market can be omitted, is decreased. Effectively, the new version provides for only one such case. It may not be necessary to determine the level of concentration on a goods market and entry barriers in order to analyze the state of competition for the purposes of compiling the Register of Economic Entities under Clause 8 Part 1 Article 23 Federal Law “On Protection of Competition” (Clause 1.3).

Sometimes analyzing the state of competition is unnecessary. Therefore, the procedures contain an exhaustive list of cases (Clause 1.4) that do not require analysis of the state of competition on a relevant market.

Some of the provisions are clarified. For instance, the Order now contains a clarified list of basic information about goods markets used to analyze the state of competition on a goods market (Clause 1.5), and the list of factors taken into account for identifying conditions of goods circulation that restrict economic, technical or other possibilities for acquiring the goods (Clause 4.3).

The Procedures include a modified list of methods used to define geographic boundaries of a goods market (Clause 4.5).

The Procedures also include a clarified list of suggested actions performed to analyze the conduct of economic entities operating on a goods market (Clause 9.3).

For the purposes of simplification, requirements to analytical reports are removed from the document (Section 11).