2020 TSMA

38 2020 Taiwan Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association or at least a substantial reduction of currently still existing privileges of manufacturers of branded products. This includes numerous lobbying groups of Silicon Valley giants such as Amazon and Google, but also the Alibaba Group and diverse online retail- er associations – in the latter category again with the German Bundesverband Onlinehandel (BVOH) at the forefront as very aggressive voice of the online pure player in Germany and beyond. Within the sporting goods sector, the European Sporting Goods Industry Federation FESI headquar- tered in Brussels forwarded in early 2019 a position paper to the EU Commission to clearly articulate the interests (and also concerns) of this Sector. Key Points of FESI’s Position Paper were: • To represent 1,800 European manufacturers of sporting goods at European level, which corre- sponds to approximately 85% of the European market (with 70 to 75% SMEs). The total num- ber of persons employed in this industry sector amounts to more than 650,000, who generated a total annual turnover of EUR66 billion. • A strong pleading for the further continuation of essential elements of the VBER 2010 also after 2022; • To maintain a fair balance and equilibrium be- tween the interests of the manufacturers/brands, the retailers and the consumers; • A change of the wide-spread mindset that instru- ments applied by manufacturers such as recom- mended retail prices, price statistics and the like are regarded with general suspicion of (prohibited) price-fixing at the diverse sales levels; • The removal of diverging interpretations of anti- trust laws and rules and of court verdicts by nation- al competition law authorities (with the German FCO on the forefront), which impede cross border trade; • The continued acknowledgement of the legitimacy of selective distribution systems and the recogni- tion of the freedom of choice of any manufacturer (including market strong and market dominating brands) to determine with whom they want to trade with and in which distribution channels they want to be represented; • To honor the principle that brick-and-mortar re- tailers do quite frequently incur higher cost for the distribution of sporting goods than pure online players with the consequence that the grant of dif- ferentiated conditions and incentives in this area should be permitted. Consequently: Your current European distribu- tion and sales model could be at risk, if far-reach- ing modifications of the existing VBER 2010 were