Resale Price Maintenance in EU Competition Law: Understanding the Significance of Super Bock

By:Pablo Ibañez Colomo (Chillin Competition)

This month’s issue of World Competition features a short piece of mine (the submitted version is available on SSRN) discussing resale price maintenance in the wake of the Super Bock ruling.

I thought it worth sharing a few thoughts on this case, as it seems to be one of those rulings best understood when considered alongside national-level developments. For those who read Portuguese, I particularly recommend looking at the judgment of the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa, which followed the preliminary ruling.

What does Super Bock contribute to our understanding of Article 101(1) TFEU? Before this judgment, resale price maintenance was treated as inherently restrictive of competition—automatically and universally—without requiring an analysis of the relevant economic or legal context, or consideration of the parties’ intentions.

In Binon, the Court explicitly dismissed the relevance of contextual factors in cases of vertical price-fixing. This rigid approach to evaluating competition restrictions was unsurprisingly adopted by the Portuguese first-instance court in the Super Bock case…

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