The core of this incident is that Doosan Bobcat Korea unilaterally transferred the business risks that it should have borne as the headquarters to a weak party called an agency. According to the Fair Trade Commission's investigation, even though the dealership had already provided physical collateral based on annual sales, they forced a third party to act as a guarantor for the material under the pretext of lack of additional collateral. We even had agency employees and their families act as joint guarantors, so that the financial impact that could occur in the event of default would spread to the agency owner's entire life. This shows that the agency owner is not an independent business under the direction of the headquarters, but has been reduced to a subordinate organization that virtually assumes the risks of the headquarters.

A more serious problem is the unfair trade practice of passing on the risk of non-payment arising from a sales contract with the end consumer to the dealer. Despite the fact that direct transactions take place between headquarters and consumers in the typical construction and industrial equipment distribution structure, Doosan Bobcat Korea had its dealers pay for the costs if consumers did not pay. Specifically, the contract included an ‘offset clause’ that allows the head office to arbitrarily deduct the consumer’s receivables from the sales commission payable to the agency. Considering that the commission rate that dealers receive is only 8.5% of the product price, this was a very threatening clause that could completely destroy the dealer's profit structure.

The Fair Trade Commission evaluated that this sanction goes beyond simple fines and contains a strong message that it will strictly regulate suppliers' abuse of their superior position. Fortunately, there have not yet been confirmed cases in which Doosan Bobcat Korea actually exercised a lien or actually offset the agency's commission, but simply specifying such a toxic clause in the contract would have placed psychological pressure on the agency owners and resulted in unfair transactions. Considering the size of the company's assets and sales revealed during the investigation, it is highly likely that the level of collateral requested from the agency could be interpreted as an intention to solidify the one-sided hierarchy in the transaction relationship, rather than as a means to ensure management stability at the headquarters.

Immediately after the investigation, Doosan Bobcat Korea took self-rescue measures such as immediately stopping joint guarantee requests and deleting the problematic unfair contract provisions. However, the Fair Trade Commission did not view this incident as a simple practical error, but defined it as an abuse of status in the transaction and imposed a prohibition and notification order. This is our intention to inform agency owners of our headquarters' unfair actions and to tighten our legal surveillance network to prevent the same type of unfair transactions from repeating in the future. The way a company threatens the survival of its subordinate partners by leveraging economies of scale can no longer be a sustainable management model, and this sanctions serves as an opportunity to once again confirm the need of the times for coexistence.