TSMA Yearbook 2019

37 Taiwan Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association non-compliant elements on such pages. Until to date – i.e. in the month of August 2018 and approx. three months after the GDPR became effective, no big ‘tsunami’ has hit the industry to my best knowledge. Yet the concerns that something like that could happen had been so big that some companies decided to shut down their web sites to avoid being not exposed to such risks – a reaction, which is in my personal view certainly very much exaggerated. Further, it is much too early right now to send the all-clear message. It is anyway fair say that the new EU law, which for the very first time can now be combined with a kind of collective class court action by consumers, NGOs, lawyers and other entities – unheard so far in Continental Europe – has undoubtedly from a risk management point of view increased the exposure of a company (which reach from a one man operation up to global players with billions of USD of annual turnover generated) to get caught by these new law provisions also in the sporting goods sector.