The Taipei High Administrative Court on Wednesday overturned a decision by the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) to fine four convenience store chains a total of NT$20 million (US$675,600) for allegedly manipulating the price of fresh-brewed coffee.
The commission said 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, Hi-Life and OK-Mart had fixed prices because they each raised the cost of a cup of coffee by NT$5 in November 2011.
As the four chains account for 80 percent of the freshly brewed coffee market, the commission said they had the ability to fix prices and hurt competitors.
It said the price hike had influenced the entire supply and demand chain for fresh-brewed coffee in convenience stores and contravened Article 14 of the Fair Trade Act (公平交易法).
The commission fined the companies according to the scale and size of their operations, with 7-Eleven being fined NT$16 million, FamilyMart NT$2.5 million, Hi-Life NT$1 million and OK-Mart NT$500,000.
The convenience store chains appealed the fines to the Taipei High Administrative Court, which in December last year overruled the commission.
The commission subsequently appealed the case.
In Wednesday’s ruling, the Taipei High Administrative Court said that the price hikes did not constitute joint efforts to manipulate prices as it was difficult to prove that the four had colluded to fix prices, and the most direct reason for the price hike was an increase in the cost of milk.
It said that the market for coffee was extremely competitive and pricing in the industry was very transparent, which usually meant that if one company raised its prices others would follow suit. The same thing happened if the price fell, it said.
The price increase was “logical from an economic sense,” the court and ruled that the fines be repealed.
Commission spokesman Sun Li-chun (孫立群) said the ruling would be appealed.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not