Adidas AG will continue to ban its U.S. dealers from selling its products on third-party marketplace sites such as Amazon.com and EBay.com, despite agreeing to reverse the policy in Germany to address the concerns of anti-trust regulators in its native country, Sports Executive Weekly confirmed last week.
“While there is a new global policy, we have reviewed this on a market basis and can confirm that there are no changes to our policy in the U.S.,” an spokesperson for Adidas US told Sports Executive Weekly. “Adidas in the U.S. will continue to restrict retail partners from using open online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.”
Experts in U.S. anti-trust laws said they were not surprised that Adidas would continue the policy in the United States, as European regulators have generally been less permissive on such matters.
“Those kinds of restrictions are more common in the United States,” said Jim Hartley, an attorney with Holland & Hart, who advises several sporting goods companies. “We believe restrictions of this sort are fully consistent with governing U.S. anti-trust law.”
Hartley added the caveat that like the the regulatory environment in the U.S. could always change given how rapidly the competitive environment is changing.
The Bundeskartellamt, or German Cartel Office, announced July 7 that it had closed an investigation of Adidas AG after the company amended its policies to comply with the country’s competition law. Specifically, Adidas agreed to drop a policy it rolled out in 2012 that prohibited its dealers from selling via large online market places such as eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Rakuten.de, Yatego.de, Hitmeister.de and meinPaket.de.
The Bundeskartellamt asked Adidas to consider amending its policy after receiving complaints from sporting goods dealers.
“It goes without saying that manufacturers can select their distributors according to certain quality requirements,” noted Bundeskartellamt President Andreas Mundt last week. “However, both under European and German competition law they are prohibited from largely eliminating a principal distribution channel. Our proceedings against Adidas and also against Asics (which have not yet been concluded) serve as test cases because currently a number of brand manufacturers are contemplating similar measures.”
Mundt added that allowing access to third-party market places was critical to sustaining small and medium-sized sports retailers losing customers to online retailers.
To resolve Bundeskartellamt concerns, Adidas abandoned the policy and clarified that all authorized retailers are free to use Adidas brand related terms as search words for search engine advertising such as Google AdWords.
