London: Amazon and Apple were fined a total of $218 million in Spain for allegedly stifling competition in the country's e-commerce industry for reselling and marketing of Apple products.
Apple was penalised $161 million and Amazon was fined around $57 million by the Spanish antitrust authority CNMC.
The country's competition watchdog found that both the companies "unreasonably restricted the number of resellers of Apple products on the Amazon website in Spain".
The tech giants also "limited the advertising spaces where competing Apple products can be advertised on the Amazon website in Spain".
"Finally, they limited the possibility of Amazon directing marketing campaigns to customers of Apple products on its website in Spain to offer them competing products from other brands," the authority said in a statement.
Now, Apple and Amazon have settled on a set of contractual provisions that regulate Amazon's role as an Apple distributor, which previously had an impact on the availability of Apple and other brands on the Amazon website in Spain.
The watchdog claims that more than 90% of the resellers who were using the Amazon website in Spain to sell Apple products at retail were excluded from the country's main online market.
"Sales of Apple products through the Amazon website in Spain by sellers based in other EU countries were reduced, thus limiting trade between member states and there was an increase in the relative prices paid by consumers for the purchase of Apple products in said online market in Spain", the antitrust authority noted.—Inputs from Agencies
