Philippines: Regulator raises threshold for M&A review

On Monday, March 5, the Philippine antitrust watchdog doubled the threshold to trigger a review of mergers and acquisitions, in a move seen partly as appeasing big businesses who have complained about how the country’s new competition policy is enforced.

The Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) said it had recalibrated the threshold for the size of a transaction to 2 billion pisos (US$38.5 million), and to 5 billion pisos (US$96.3 million) in either annual gross revenue or assets for parties involved in a deal. Under rules put in place in 2016, a default threshold of 1 billion pisos (US$19.2 million) for either category was enough to activate a review.

The regulator said the threshold would be adjusted every year beginning in March 2019, based on the growth of country’s gross domestic product the previous year “rounded up to the nearest hundred million.”

“Adjusting the thresholds requires a delicate balance to make sure that it’s not too low as to create an undue burden on business, and that it’s not too high that transactions with potential anti-competitive effects in the market evade the scope of antitrust reviews,” said PCC Chairman Arsenio Balisacan.

Full Content: CBN

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