Current Consultations

Consultation under section 2, Schedule 2 to the Competition Ordinance regarding the Commission’s proposal to accept commitments from two online food delivery platforms in relation to their respective agreements with partnering restaurants

On 1 June 2023, the Competition Commission (“Commission”) published proposed commitments from two online food delivery platforms, namely Delivery Hero Food Hong Kong Limited (“Foodpanda”) and Deliveroo Hong Kong Limited (“Deliveroo”) in relation to certain terms in their respective agreements with partnering restaurants in Hong Kong. The relevant legal entities of Foodpanda and Deliveroo providing the proposed commitments are together referred to as the "Parties".

The Commission has conducted an investigation under section 39 of the Competition Ordinance (Cap. 619) (“Ordinance”) into whether the following provisions in the Parties' respective agreements with their partner restaurants may hinder entry and expansion by new or smaller platforms and/or soften competition in the market:

1. Exclusive Terms, whereby Foodpanda or Deliveroo charges partnering restaurants a lower commission rate on the condition that the restaurants work exclusively with the respective online food delivery platform;
2. Breach of Exclusivity Provisions, which restrict partnering restaurants from, or penalise them for, switching from working exclusively with Foodpanda or Deliveroo to also partnering with other platforms;
3. Price Restriction Provisions, which prevent partnering restaurants from charging lower prices, or require them to charge the same prices for menu items:
   1. on their own direct channels (so-called narrow price parity); and
   2. in the case of Foodpanda only, on competing platforms (so-called wide price parity);
   as compared to their prices on Foodpanda or Deliveroo; and
4. Tying Provisions (Foodpanda only), which require partnering restaurants which use Foodpanda's food delivery services to also use its order-to-pickup services, whereby consumers can place an order on Foodpanda's platform and pick it up at the restaurant themselves.

In response to the investigation, each of the Parties have separately offered commitments under section 60 of the Ordinance to remove the Breach of Exclusivity Provisions, Price Restriction Provisions and Tying Provisions from agreements with partnering restaurants. Furthermore, they have offered not to apply the Exclusive Terms against online food delivery platforms with a market share of 10% or less in Hong Kong.

In accordance with the procedure set out in section 2, Schedule 2 of the Ordinance, the Commission invites interested parties to submit representations in writing on the proposed commitments.

In addition to the proposed commitments, the Commission has published an FAQs document to provide further useful information on the relevant provisions mentioned above, the commitments given by the Parties and the consultation.

The documents published are:

• Notice issued under section 2, Schedule 2 of the Ordinance of the proposed commitments; and
• Annexed to the Notice, the proposed commitments from each of Foodpanda and Deliveroo

For FAQs, click here. For a copy of the press release, click here .

Further details on how to submit a representation to the Commission are outlined in the above Notice issued under section 2, Schedule 2 of the Ordinance of the proposed commitments.

Representations should be submitted by 18:00 on 15 June 2023 .