ECA Investigates Companies Inflating Prices for Schoolbooks

On 23 June 2024, the board of directors of the Egyptian Competition Authority (ECA) determined that three companies operating in printing, publishing, and distribution of external school textbooks for primary, preparatory, and secondary schools violated the Egyptian competition law through agreements that aimed to inflate prices for schoolbooks.

Through their investigation the ECA found that the three largest providers of external school books for primary, preparatory, and secondary schools in Egypt, had agreed to decrease the discounts given to distributors, wholesalers, and libraries. Thereby, the companies caused the prices for schoolbooks to increase. The ECA found that this action constituted a violation of article 6(a) of Law 3/2005, the Egyptian Competition Law, which prohibits price fixing.

The ECA obligated the violating companies to immediately and permanently cease holding any meetings or concluding agreements aimed to artificially raise, reduce, fix, or otherwise modify prices or discount rates, and to stop exchanging any data or information related to pricing.

The action taken by the ECA is in line with the authority’s focus on consumer facing sectors with impact on vulnerable parts of Egyptian society. The education sector is one of the sectors the ECA has taken a particular interest in this afford. In 2023, the ECA conducted several investigations into the education sector. In their decision of 25 February 2023 the ECA determined that the representative offices of two foreign publishing houses, in close cooperation with their authorized, Egyptian distributors, had engaged in horizontal agreements aimed at artificially increasing the price of educational textbooks in Egypt (for more details see our client update of 26 February 2023). Furthermore, in the second half of 2023, the ECA investigated violations of article 6(c), by 11 public and private schools and found them to have abused their dominant position in the market by restricting the sale of uniforms to exclusive outlets (for more details see our client update of 24 September 2023).