The Paper Tiger: Thailand’s Toothless Competition Law

In 2019, Thailand’s competition regulator caught two buyers of agricultural produce doing something textbook illegal: threatening rival buyers to keep them from purchasing from farmers in the same area, and effectively carving up the supply between themselves.⁵ The penalty was 25,000 baht — about US$700. It had started as 10% of the offenders’ turnover, then been halved because they cooperated.⁵

Two years later, the Dutch competition authority fined a near-identical scheme — collectors of used cooking oil colluding to suppress the prices they paid and to allocate suppliers between them — around €4 million, and separately fined three individuals for running it.¹⁹ Same conduct on the buying side of a market. A difference in consequence of roughly four orders of magnitude.

That gap is the story of competition policy in Thailand. The country has a modern law, a dedicated commission and a statute book that reads much like Europe’s. What it lacks is the will, or the teeth, to use them against the conglomerates that dominate the markets ordinary Thais buy from every day.

Contents

• A law built to have teeth
• …that rarely bites
• Three markets, one pattern
• What teeth look like: the European comparison
• The reform that keeps stalling

---

A law built to have teeth

Thailand’s current competition regime is the Trade Competition Act B.E. 2560 (2017), which took effect in October of that year and replaced a 1999 law that, in nearly two decades on the books, never produced a single successful prosecution.⁸ The new act was explicitly meant to fix that. Commentators dubbed it the “economic constitution,” and it was designed to prohibit cartels, abuse of a dominant position and unfair trade practices, while introducing a merger-control regime that requires prior approval for deals that could create a monopoly or substantially lessen competition.⁶

On its face the statute is not weak. For abuse of dominance or a hardcore cartel, it allows criminal penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment or a fine of 10% of the offender’s turnover in the year of the offence, or both.⁶ Administrative fines of up to 10% of annual turnover are also available for a broader set of infringements, and the law was given extraterritorial reach over conduct abroad that harms the Thai market.⁶ The commission was restructured to be more independent and staffed with specialists rather than serving ministers.⁷ In short, the tools exist.

…that rarely bites

The record is another matter. The 25,000-baht farm-buyer case is the emblem, but the pattern is broader. Throughout 2021 the commission imposed several administrative fines but did not attempt to pursue a single criminal penalty.⁶ As of May 2022 it had received 41 complaints of abuse of dominance and 12 of collusion between competitors — a docket that has yielded very few completed enforcement actions.²⁴ In its 2025 peer review of Thailand, the OECD concluded bluntly that competition enforcement remains “still very incipient” despite the law having existed in some form for over 25 years.²²

To be fair to the regulator, the picture is not uniformly bleak. Since 2019 it has become visibly more active — issuing guidelines that define its core offences, publishing rules to protect smaller suppliers on credit terms, and imposing at least one substantial penalty: a roughly 12-million-baht settlement in an abuse-of-dominance case involving an energy-drink manufacturer.⁵ It has also invested in building expertise, expanding cooperation with the OECD, ASEAN bodies, the EU and counterparts in Japan and Australia.²³ There is a genuine capacity-building effort under way.

But capacity is not the same as bite, and the clearest measure of bite is what happens when a dominant firm wants to get bigger. On that test, the regulator has a habit of saying yes.

Three markets, one pattern

Retail: the deal that defined the law

The single most consequential competition decision of the past decade was the 2020 approval of Charoen Pokphand Group’s US$10.6 billion (338 billion baht) acquisition of Tesco’s Thai business, now rebranded Lotus’s.⁹ This was, in the words of contemporaneous reporting, the first major test of the 2017 act.⁸ CP already ran the Makro cash-and-carry chain and close to 12,000 7-Eleven convenience stores in Thailand; Tesco added roughly 2,000 hypermarkets and smaller stores.⁸¹² Critics argued the real problem was not any single retail segment but CP’s presence across all of them — convenience, cash-and-carry and hypermarket at once — which hands the group leverage over suppliers as much as over shoppers.⁹

The commission approved the deal on a 4–3 vote. It acknowledged the merger would produce “increased market power,” but concluded it would not amount to a monopoly and would not seriously harm the economy or consumers.⁸ It attached conditions, including a three-year ban on further modern-trade retail mergers and obligations to keep buying from small suppliers.⁸ A former member of the competition committee said the ruling was not in the spirit of a law meant to stop dominant firms from gaining an unfair edge;¹⁰ the head of a smaller supermarket chain warned that reduced bargaining power would leave rivals buying stock on worse terms.⁸

The Foundation for Consumers and 37 other groups sued, arguing the commission had ignored the act’s requirement to consult stakeholders and had handed CP an overwhelming share of the combined wholesale and retail market.¹¹ In September 2023 the Central Administrative Court dismissed the challenge, affirming the approval in full.¹³ The law had been tested, and it had cleared the largest retail consolidation in the country’s history. For context, CP is not the only conglomerate in modern grocery — Central Group’s Tops and the Sirivadhanabhakdi family’s Big C are the other two big chains — but no single family combines the reach across formats that CP now does.

Telecoms: three into two

The mobile market tells a parallel story through a different regulator. In 2022–23, True Corporation (backed by CP, Telenor and China Mobile) merged with DTAC, collapsing a three-player market into two.¹ The result is a clean duopoly: True on roughly 53% of subscribers and AIS on about 45%, with the two together holding close to 99% of the market and the state-owned third operator barely a rounding error.² Post-merger, industry observers reported that prices rose and cheaper low-value plans were withdrawn — the outcome competition authorities exist to prevent.³

Tellingly, this deal never reached the Trade Competition Commission. It was handled by the sector regulator, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, whose board “acknowledged” the merger with a set of remedies rather than blocking it — and did so amid genuine legal uncertainty about whether it, or the competition authority, even had jurisdiction.⁴ Consumer groups and AIS petitioned the courts to halt it, without success.⁴ The telcos’ defence was the standard one: scale would fund faster 5G rollout and better service. That efficiency argument is real and contestable — but the structure it produced is not in dispute.

Agribusiness: dominance at the farmgate

Food production is where market power reaches furthest down the chain. Here the structure is a dominant-firm oligopoly rather than a duopoly: CP Foods is the clear leader, Betagro a distant second, with Cargill, GFPT and Laemthong filling out a top five that controls roughly 70–75% of Thailand’s chicken exports.¹⁴ The lever is contract farming, pioneered in Thailand by CP in the 1970s, under which the integrator supplies chicks, feed and inputs and buys back the output at a pre-agreed price.¹³

Defenders point out — with justification — that contract farming has lifted yields and given smallholders more stable incomes than open-market selling.¹³ But academic work on the system finds the bargaining relationship deeply lopsided: farmers who fall out with one integrator often cannot find another buyer, contracts can be unclear or one-sided, and the state has done little to loosen the grip, in part because of weak enforcement of competition law.¹³ This is the market whose buyer-side collusion earned that 25,000-baht fine.

Market	Leading players	Structure	Who cleared the key deal
Modern retail	CP (7-Eleven, Makro, Lotus’s); Central (Tops); Big C	Dominant group across all formats	Trade Competition Commission (4–3, 2020)
Mobile telecoms	True (~53%), AIS (~45%)	Duopoly (~99% combined)	NBTC (sector regulator, 2022)
Poultry & livestock	CP Foods, Betagro, Cargill, GFPT, Laemthong	Dominant-firm oligopoly (~70–75% of exports)	n/a — built via contract farming
Sources: telecom shares2; retail merger8; poultry export concentration.14

What teeth look like: the European comparison

The contrast that makes the Thai record legible is Europe, where competition authorities routinely impose penalties in the hundreds of millions and are willing to block deals outright. Between 2010 and 2019 the European Commission alone imposed roughly €28.5 billion in fines for competition infringements.¹⁵ Individual cases dwarf anything Thailand has attempted: €4.34 billion against Google over Android in 2018,¹⁶ €1.8 billion against Apple over music-streaming distribution and €797 million against Meta over Facebook Marketplace, both in 2024.¹⁷

National authorities are just as willing. France’s Autorité de la concurrence fined Apple €1.1 billion in 2020 for price-fixing through its distribution network — then its largest-ever sanction in a single case — and has since levied repeated nine-figure fines on Google and Apple.¹⁸ Germany’s Bundeskartellamt runs regular dawn raids and treats concentration in food production and retail as a standing enforcement priority.²⁰ And the Dutch ACM case that opened this article is the sharpest parallel of all: structurally the same buyer-side cartel as the Thai farm case, penalised at roughly €4 million with named individuals held personally liable.¹⁹

Same conduct, different consequence	Thailand (2019)	Netherlands (2021)
Conduct	Buyers of farm produce colluding to block rivals and split suppliers	Used-cooking-oil collectors colluding to suppress prices and split suppliers
Penalty on firms	~25,000 baht (≈ US$700)	~€4 million (≈ US$4.3 million)
Individuals fined	No	Yes — three
Sources: Thai farm-buyer case5; Dutch ACM cooking-oil cartel.19

The comparison should not be overdrawn. Europe’s approach is itself contested: when the Commission blocked the Three/O2 mobile merger in the UK in 2016 — precisely the kind of four-to-three deal Thailand allowed — an EU court later annulled the decision, finding the regulator had not met its burden of proof.²¹ The point is not that Europe always says no. It is that a four-to-three merger there triggers years of adversarial, in-depth scrutiny and a real prospect of prohibition, whereas Thailand’s equivalent was acknowledged and cleared. Scrutiny, not just outcomes, is what deterrence is built from.

The reform that keeps stalling

Thailand’s policymakers are aware of the gap. Through 2024 and 2025, political parties, the regulator, business and civil society converged on the view that the 2017 act needed clearer rules and stronger enforcement tools, and a draft amendment was prepared and put through public consultation.²³ One notable feature of the debate is counterintuitive: much of the reform camp wants to remove criminal sanctions, replacing them with administrative “Phinai” fines.²³ The logic is that criminal liability carries such a high evidentiary burden — proof beyond reasonable doubt — that it has made cases nearly impossible to bring, so a purely monetary regime might actually be enforced more often.²⁴ It is a reasonable argument, though it trades deterrent symbolism for administrative speed.

Whatever its merits, the draft did not make it. It passed an initial reading and moved to a subcommittee, then stalled when Parliament was dissolved.²³ There is a long echo here: Thailand’s very first competition bill, in the 1990s, was also derailed more than once by parliamentary dissolutions before a version finally passed in 1999.²⁵ A generation later, the pattern repeats — a law strengthened just enough to satisfy the demand for reform, then left without the enforcement muscle to match its language.

For now, the paper tiger keeps its shape. The statute reads like Europe’s; the fines read like rounding errors. And in the markets where it matters most — the phone in a consumer’s pocket, the shelf at the corner store, the price a farmer is offered for a flock — the same few conglomerates set the terms, with a competition authority that has the power to intervene and, so far, seldom the appetite.

---

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “True–DTAC merger” (overview of the 2021–23 merger and duopoly outcome).
2. Yozzo, “Thailand’s telecom regulator allows the merger between TRUE and DTAC” (post-merger market shares).
3. Operator Watch, “5G, Mergers and Momentum in Thailand’s Mobile Sector” (price increases and package cuts post-merger).
4. Telecoms.com, “Telenor’s DTAC, True complete controversial Thailand tie-up”; Wikipedia (NBTC acknowledgement, jurisdiction question and court petitions).
5. Tilleke & Gibbins, “The Development of Trade Competition Legislation in Thailand” (25,000-baht agricultural buyer case; ~12-million-baht energy-drink abuse case).
6. Norton Rose Fulbright, “Competition law fact sheet: Thailand” (penalty structure; merger provisions; 2021 absence of criminal penalties).
7. RWT Law, “Thailand’s New Trade Competition Act: A Paper Tiger or Effective Enforcement?”; Bangkok Post, “New trade competition law lacks teeth” (commission restructuring and “paper tiger” characterisation).
8. Bangkok Post, “CP-Tesco ruling riles rivals” and “CP-Tesco merger spells pain for small businesses” (4–3 vote; “increased market power”; first major test; store counts; supplier concerns; 1999 law never used).
9. Asia Times, “CP Group’s Tesco takeover rings monopoly alarm” and “A monopoly moment of truth for Thailand” (deal value; dominance across retail segments).
10. The Nation, “Public outrage over approval for CP Group’s acquisition of Tesco Lotus” (TDRI/former commissioner criticism).
11. The Thaiger, “Consumer groups sue Trade Competition Commission for approving CP-Tesco merger” (Foundation for Consumers and 37 groups; market-share claim).
12. In-House Community, “Scrutinising CP Group’s acquisition of Tesco” (7-Eleven, Makro and Tesco store counts).
13. Rajah & Tann Asia, “C.P. Retail Development and Tesco Stores win administrative lawsuit” (2023 Central Administrative Court judgment); academic study on Thailand’s Contract Farming Act (bargaining asymmetry and weak enforcement); CP Foods and FAO/industry material on contract farming.
14. Ipsos, “Thailand’s Poultry Industry” (top-five exporters’ ~70–75% share).
15. European Court of Auditors, Special Report on EU competition enforcement (≈ €28.5 billion in Commission fines, 2010–2019).
16. European Commission / Concurrences (€4.34 billion Google Android fine, 2018).
17. CNBC and BleepingComputer (Apple €1.8 billion, 2024; Meta €797 million, 2024).
18. PBS/AP and Autorité de la concurrence (Apple €1.1 billion, 2020; subsequent Google and Apple fines).
19. Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), “ACM imposes fines for price-fixing agreements involving the purchase of used cooking oil” (≈ €4 million; individuals fined).
20. Ashurst, “The FCO 2025/26 Review”; Bundeskartellamt (food-production and retail as enforcement priority; dawn raids).
21. Telecoms.com and Kirkland & Ellis (European Commission block of Three/O2, 2016, and its 2020 annulment by the General Court in CK Telecoms).
22. OECD, “Peer Reviews of Competition Law and Policy: Thailand” (2025) (enforcement “still very incipient”).
23. Nishimura & Asahi and Mondaq, updates on the draft Trade Competition Act amendment (2025–26) (consultation; “Phinai” fine; stall on parliamentary dissolution; capacity-building).
24. Global Competition Review, “Thailand: proposed legislation…” (41 abuse and 12 collusion complaints as of May 2022; evidentiary burden of criminal sanctions).
25. Trade Competition Commission of Thailand, “History of Trade Competition Act B.E. 2560” (1990s bills derailed by parliamentary dissolutions).