New Guidelines on Horizontal Co-operation Agreements

On January 14, 2011, the European Commission published new Guidelines on the Applicability of Article 101 TFEU to Horizontal Co-operation Agreements (OJ 2011, C11/1, the “Guidelines”), replacing the corresponding Guidelines from 2001. A draft of the Guidelines was published in May 2010 for public consultation. The Guidelines cover cooperation in the area of exchange of information, research and development, specialization, production, purchasing, commercialization, technical standardization and standard terms. This Alert Memo focuses on the two most important changes in the Guidelines: the newly introduced information exchange section and the standardization section, which contains substantial changes in comparison to the 2001 Guidelines.