Merger control in some ASEAN member states: Evolving from the aspirational inception phase towards implementation challenges?

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Competition law in ASEAN, has come a long way from its humble beginning and has swiftly grown over the past decade. When referring to competition legislations and policy, one will evidently include all three traditional pillars of enforcement – i.e., anticompetitive agreements, abuses of dominance and merger control. In this article, the authors focus on merger control rules, and most particularly mandatory regimes in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, from a practical standpoint, with the objective of demonstrating how crucial this is for global companies to keep abreast of recent developments in ASEAN countries in light of the multi-jurisdictional nature of their merger filing assessment.

I. Introduction 1. Competition law in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, abbreviated as ASEAN, has come a long way from its humble beginning and has swiftly grown over the past decade with Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam as the three pioneers amongst ASEAN member states to introduce a comprehensive competition law regime, respectively in 1999 (Indonesia) and 2004 (Singapore and Vietnam). Although the initial aspiration of ASEAN member states was to achieve the introduction of national competition legislations in every member state by 2015, it was only in October 2021 that Cambodia enacted its long-awaited Competition Act into law, becoming the last ASEAN member state to reinforce its support towards the initial objective of the ASEAN Economic Community. 2. On 11 October 2021,

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