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A subscription only web service used by the major petrol
retailers and supermarket chains to swap pump price information
could be "promoting anti-competitive behaviour" in the fuel market,
the consumer watchdog has warned.
With soaring petrol prices once again the focus of political
debate, authorities have been quietly monitoring a Queensland
company, Informed Sources, which, according to its website, aims to
provide "oil company clients with accurate and timely data from
more than 3500 sites every 15 minutes across the major capital
cities".
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is concerned
that the company, which charges clients an unknown but large
amount, has been giving the big petrol companies and supermarket
chains a competitive leg-up at the expense of smaller retailers and
consumers.
Subscribers publish their own prices on the website and have
access to information provided by other retailers, updated every 15
minutes.
The commission's petrol price inquiry suggested that the website
had increased the risk of what it called "anti-competitive
co-ordination" or "conscious parallelism" in the petrol market,
essentially allowing the big players to respond strategically to
real-time pricing information not available to motorists or smaller
retailers.
"Informed Sources circulates up-to-date individualised price
data to its subscribers who are primarily refiner-marketers and the
supermarket chains, data which is not available to consumers and
other market participants," the commission said. "The circulation
of price data on a very frequent, or near real-time basis, raises
concerns that it could be promoting anti-competitive behaviour
among the refiner-marketers and supermarket chains in the retail
market."
The issue of petrol price gouging has been the subject of debate
for years, with authorities consistently unable to uncover any
evidence of widespread collusion despite periodic claims from
motoring and consumer groups.
Informed Sources has been a strident behind-the-scenes critic of
the Federal Government's FuelWatch scheme, which will from December
force retailers to publicly display their intended prices a day in
advance, rendering the subscription web service useless.
The key claim of the company — and the Federal Opposition
— is that the FuelWatch scheme would serve to flatten out
weekly price volatility, leaving less scope for people to
capitalise on cheaper periods in the weekly discounting cycle.
Petrol Commissioner Pat Walker said the inquiry had found no
evidence that consumer laws had been breached, although it was
concerned the website could promote anti-competitive behaviour.
He said Informed Sources reduced the incentive to discount
because competitors using the service could quickly match the
reduction. It also reduced the risk to any company raising prices
significantly, because if the rest of the market did not follow
they could quickly lower their price.
"Clearly the introduction of the national FuelWatch scheme is
going to significantly impact on their (Informed Sources) business,
there is no doubt about that," Mr Walker said.
Informed Sources group strategist Alan Price acknowledged that
FuelWatch would harm one of the company's core sources of revenue.
He said he was strongly of the view that the service in no way
promoted anti-competitive behaviour or "conscious parallelism".
Prior to the service the oil companies had driven around
collecting the information themselves, he said.
PetrolWorld 180508 Source: The age
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