Hello Kitty's Parent Company was Fined 48 Million Yuan for Violating EU’s Competition Law

According to Kyodo News Agency, the European Commission announced on July 9 that it had ordered Sanrio, a Japanese company with a popular cartoon image of Hello Kitty, to pay a fine of 6222,000 euros (about 480,183,000 yuan) on suspicion of authorization of image use and commodity sales in the European Union. To hinder competition is a violation of the EU Competition Law.

According to the report, the European Commission believed that Sanrio authorized units in the EU to sell cartoon-like goods such as schoolbags, stationery and toys, but restricted their cross-border sales in the EU within about 11 years up to December last year. The European Commission's Competition Commissioner, Vistag, pointed out that such restrictions narrowed the choices of consumers and could lead to higher prices.

In addition, because Sanrio cooperated with the European Commission investigation, the fines were reduced by 40% compared with the stipulated ones.

According to public information, Sanrio was founded in 1960. It has more than 500 portrait stars, including Hello Kitty, Pudding Dog, Lazy Egg. Its business scope covers multiple industries including IP authorization, gift sales, film production, publishing, catering, theme park and other industries.

On May 14 this year, Sanrio announced its annual accounts for March 2019. Until March 2019, Sanrio's total assets amounted to 95.185 billion yen (about 6.015 billion yuan). In 2018 (April 4, 2018 – March 21, 2019), the company realized a total turnover of 59.120 billion yen (about RMB 3.736 billion yuan), down by 18% compared with the previous year; net profit attributed to the parent company in the current period was 3.88 billion yen (about RMB 345 million yuan), down by 21.3% compared with the previous year.

Sanrio's business is mainly divided into Japan's domestic and overseas business, within them, Japanese domestic business is divided into commodity sales business, copyright business and theme park business. During the reporting period, Sanrio's total turnover in Japan was 45.1 billion yen ($2.85 billion), down 0.4% from the same period last year, and its operating profit was 3.6 billion yen ($227 million), down 16.7% from the same period last year.

July 30, 2019

Source: Sino-Singapore Longitudinal and Weft Client

Photo from: 6199pic.com