NAVARRO, Bea Czarina B.

Corp Prac

REACTION PAPER

Today, our speaker talked about the Philippine Competition Law. To be honest, I really
don’t have much knowledge about it so the terms are a bit novel to me so this seminar was
really helpful for a very clueless girl considering that the Philippine Competition Law is part of
the bar exam and the bar exam is fast approaching. How am I supposed to study that? I mean,
I’ve got no background of such law. At least after the seminar, I already learned much about
this law.

Some of the new concepts that I learned in the talk are relevant market, bid rigging,
price fixing, per se violations, and whatnot. One of the most important ones that the
Commissioner explained are violations under Section 14 of the PCA. Per se violations are those
acts described under Section 14(a) of the PCA, to wit:

(1) Restricting competition as to price, or components thereof, or other terms

of trade;

(2) Fixing price at an auction or in any form of bidding including cover bidding,
bid suppression, bid rotation and market allocation and other analogous
practices of bid manipulation;

14(a)(1) talks about price fixing while 14(a)(2) talks about bid rigging. These violations are
committed by the mere act. The test of reason, whether or not the act was done in furtherance
of business objectives, does not apply to excuse you from doing such acts.

On the other hand, 14(b) applies the test of object or effect hence, the element that it
has the object or effect of “substantially preventing, restricting or lessening competition” must
concur in order for it to be considered a violation of the PCA.

14(c) is a catch-all phrase which talks about all other agreements not mentioned above.
It applies both the test of object of effect and the test of reason which states that “those which
contribute to improving the production or distribution of goods and services or to promoting
technical or economic progress, while allowing consumers a fair share of the resulting benefits,
may not necessarily be deemed a violation of this Act. Thus, three elements must concur in this
category.
 The most important thing that the speaker talked about to which Dean Ceballos agreed
to are mergers and acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions are important because this can be
used as a tool to perpetrate anti-competitive acts. Thus the Philippine Competition Act provides
for the necessary threshold for compulsory notification of the Philippine Competition
Commission.

This seminar was one of those that really draw my attention because competition law is
actually novel to me so at first, the Commissioner was like teaching an alien language that I had
to keep up because if not, I would have not understood a thing. Additionally, everything that
was explained would be useful for me as regards the bar exam which is forthcoming already.