Packages transfer alongside a conveyor at an Amazon success heart on Cyber Monday in Robbinsville, New Jersey, U.S., on Monday, Nov. 29, 2021.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon was fined 1.13 billion euros ($1.28 billion) on Thursday by Italian antitrust regulators for abusing its market dominance.

The Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, or AGCM,said that Amazon had harmed competing operators within the e-commerce logistics service.

It concluded that Amazon leveraged its dominant place to encourage sellers on Amazon.it to make use of its personal logistics service — Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA).

This was performed “to the detriment of the logistics providers provided by competing operators, in addition to to strengthen its personal dominant place.”

AGCM mentioned it should impose corrective steps that will likely be topic to assessment by a monitoring trustee.

Amazon mentioned it “strongly disagrees” with the wonderful and that it plans to enchantment. “The proposed wonderful and cures are unjustified and disproportionate,” an Amazon spokesperson advised CNBC.

Amazon mentioned over 50% of all annual gross sales on its platform in Italy come from small and medium-sized enterprise, including that their success is vital to Amazon’s enterprise mannequin.

“Small and medium-sized companies have a number of channels to promote their merchandise each on-line and offline: Amazon is simply a type of choices,” the Amazon spokesperson mentioned.

“We continuously make investments to assist the expansion of the 18,000 Italian SMBs that promote on Amazon, and we offer a number of instruments to our sellers, together with those that handle shipments themselves.”

Ruhell Amin, international head of retail fairness analysis at William O’Neil + Co, advised CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” on Thursday that it is a “vital” wonderful for the e-commerce big.

“It’s a part of a broader pattern that we have seen in Europe round attempting to control a few of these Big Tech firms,” he mentioned.

The concern for buyers is that the Italian wonderful may signify a broader pattern towards regulating Amazon extra closely in different elements of its enterprise as effectively, and in different elements of the world, Amin mentioned. “This definitely looks like the tip of the iceberg,” he mentioned.

“This case is attention-grabbing as a result of the European Commission opened its personal probe into this observe however carved Italy out of the scope of the investigation to permit Italy’s antitrust watchdog to proceed by itself advantage,” Amin added. “Typically the European Commission is sort of unified in its method.”

Elsewhere, regulators in China are cracking down on e-commerce big Alibaba whereas Latin American regulators are concentrating on Mercado Libre.



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