VideoYRC's Bruffett hopes to conclude the Shanghai Jiayu deal by mid-2008. He recognizes that "when you make an acquisition in China you have to be patient. There are many requirements, and you have to be methodical and work in a certain order to get everything done." Put another way, "We have to eat the elephant in chunks. Otherwise we would overwhelm our resources."
In China's recent antitrust reforms, the national government has tried to incorporate best practices by consulting the ICN and other international bodies, along with the American Bar Association and the International Bar Association. Still, some are concerned about China's regulatory path. "On its face it is not radically different from other competition laws," says one big U.S. company's legal officer, who asked not to be named. "The question is how it will be interpreted and enforced."
There is even more concern about developments in India, where existing rules have no minimum thresholds for filing a potential acquisition, and call for a long (210-day) review period. That means that even "if your deal raises no issues, you could be held up for seven months," says McDermott's Grosberg.
India is now considering revisions that differentiate between large and small deals, a "positive development," in Grosberg's view. But while in the United States courts can rule on regulators' decisions, in India, the antitrust authorities themselves hold all judicial powers, a worry for some U.S. acquirers.
Avital Louria Hahn is a senior editor at CFO.
All the World's a Review Board
Number of separate jurisdictions ruling on antitrust issues:
2001: 16
2008: 102
Country Codes
Some of the jurisdictions studying deals for anticompetitiveness
- Armenia
- Barbados
- Fiji
- Greenland
- Honduras
- Kazakhstan
- Kyrgyzstan
- Macedonia
- Malta
- Mongolia
- Montenegro
- Pakistan
- Tanzania
- Zambia
Source: The International Competition Network
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