Predatory pricing: No turf war between Trai and CCI, says Devendra Sikri

Trai had earlier introduced a new formula to identify predatory pricing

Playing down the turf war between the Competition Commission of India (CCI) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), CCI’s Chairman Devendra Sikri said there are certain overlaps but it is for both regulators to respect each other’s territory. He said such overlaps were present in all the sectors but the CCI engages with these sectorial regulators while investigating companies in those sectors.

This comes after Sikri attacked the telecom regulator for issuing norms on predatory pricing, at an event in Delhi. In his first comments on the Trai norms, Sikri said, “We do not find that the current market conditions warrant a regulatory intervention to curb predatory pricing of significant market players.” Last month, Trai came out with new rules amid allegations by established players like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular that Reliance Jio is indulging in predatory pricing ways.

Trai had introduced a new formula to identify predatory pricing, change the definition of significant market power (SMP), giving pricing flexibility only to operators with less than 30 per cent of the market’s subscribers or revenue and scrapping volume of traffic and network capacity as criterion.

For Sikri and his team at the commission, the pharma sector is one of the focus areas. “We want to conduct studies on the pharmaceutical sector and learn how the sector functions. This is apart from a study on the cab aggregator segment,” Sikri stated. With these studies the CCI aims to analyse government policies. In this, the CCI has the support of the NITI Aayog.

In a recent study conducted on hospitals in the national capital region and medical devices, the CCI had found inflated rates of syringes.

The CCI not only investigates the private sector but even government tenders are looked into. Some of the government tenders that came under the CCI’s scanner were Haryana PWD’s norms, MP government and other governments asking all testing labs to have NABL standards etc.