The Autorité de la concurrence fines the Astre transport group €3.8 million for anticompetitive practices.

The Astre group comprises small and mid-size road transport companies. It is organised in two entities:

• Astre Coopérative, which ensures compliance with the group’s internal rules of procedure, recruits new members, and proposes services and tools for members
• Astre Commercial, which sells transport and logistics services from members of the group by responding to consultations and calls for tender by key client accounts.

The Astre group organised customer allocation

The Astre group introduced in its internal rules of procedure, articles of association and membership agreement non-competition clauses whereby its members, known as Astriens, were forbidden from prospecting “listed clients”, i.e. clients identified as belonging to another member.

Even after leaving the group, former members were required to comply with the non-competition clause for one year.

Although these clauses, introduced in 1997, were removed in March 2016, the non-competition obligation continued for calls for tender. The group effectively intervened on numerous occasions to request that its members refrain from responding to requests from clients of other members, and established a priority rule. According to this rule, for calls for tender issued by a client already working with members of the group, Astre only sent this call for tender to said members, who were considered the best positioned to submit a bid.

The system also included a monitoring and sanctions mechanism with a points-based licence

A points-based licence system was introduced. Each member had a “label” with 12 points that could be removed in the event of failure to comply with the obligations set out in the internal rules of procedure, especially the non-competition clause. Losing all points resulted in withdrawal of the label and exclusion from the Astre group. Several instances led to sanctions, varying from a loss of points accompanied by financial penalties to exclusion from the Astre group.

Serious practices

Customer sharing is a serious practice in itself. In this case, it consolidated the positions of each transport company and strongly limited their commercial independence, thereby reducing alternatives for clients and price competition.

This practice took place over more than 20 years, and was not contested by the Astre group, which wanted to benefit from the settlement procedure. The Autorité accepted its request and, given all this information, issued a €3.8 million fine distributed as follows:

• Astre Coopérative €1.3 M
• Astre Commercial €2.5 M