Poland's anti-trust watchdog fines Dell PLN 6 mln; obliges company to change sales model

As reported, the proceedings against Dell concerned a suspected restrictive agreement with wholesale distributors and authorised resellers in the sale of Dell-branded IT infrastructure products to businesses and institutions, including through public procurement.

The products in question included finished IT products such as computers, laptops, peripherals (mice), as well as IT products and services for setting up IT systems, including servers, storage, disk arrays and technical support or related services, e.g. cloud services, data protection.

It was pointed out that UOKiK's doubts were raised by the sales system based on the registration of transactions by authorised sellers.

"If one of them [sellers - PAP ed.] reported in the internal registration system a potential transaction with a given institutional or business customer, then - under the suspected agreement - Dell could have prevented the other sales partners from making competitive price offers to the same customer, even at the latter's explicit request," UOKiK pointed out.

In the regulator's view, such a practice may have constituted unauthorised market sharing by allocating specific vendors to a given transaction. As a result, businesses and institutions may have been deprived of the opportunity to purchase Dell-branded equipment under more attractive price or technological conditions.

In its decision, UOKiK obliged Dell to change its sales model. Such an amicable conclusion of the proceedings is supported by the nature of the case. The transactions covered by the settlement very often concerned the delivery of complex IT solutions on individual orders.

Dell will have six months after the decision becomes final to implement the new sales rules.

The head of UOKiK also issued a decision in which he penalised Dell for providing false information during the investigation.

The company misled the authority by responding to questions about entrepreneurs who had requested an offer from Dell for the same customer. Despite making as many as three requests in this regard, the company provided UOKiK three times with false and misleading information regarding the entrepreneurs to whom Dell had not provided price offers and the reasons for not providing these offers.

As a result, UOKiK's head imposed a fine of PLN 6 million (EUR 1.4 mln) on Dell.

The issued decisions are not legally binding. They may be appealed to court.

mcb/ ao/ nl/