Sunday, January 28, 2007

Eighth circuit Court of Appeals summary judgment in Sherman Act complaint against manufacturer of multiple use kidney dialysis devices. HDC Medical v. Mandioc Corp. 061638P.pdf 01/25/2007 U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota - Minneapolis [PUBLISHED] [Smith, Author, with Bowman and Colloton, Circuit Judges]. The Plaintiff manufactured kidney dialysis devices and reprocessing solutions. The defendant competed against the Plaintiff but retooled its device to make Plaintiff's solutions unusable. Also through warranty claims and tying arrangements, it shut out Plaintiff from its customers. Plaintiff filed a Sherman Act complaint against the Defendant, alleging that the Defendant monopolized the market for reprocessing devices. The district court ordered summary judgment for the defendant finding that the defendant did not possess monopoly market power. Eighth Circuit court of appeals affirms, finding that although there was a significant price differential between defendant's products and similar products in the market, this did not segment the defendant's product into its own market. The boundaries of the product market can be determined by the reasonable interchangeability or cross-elasticity of demand between the product itself and possible substitutes for it. Brown Shoe Co. v. United States, 370 U.S. 294, 325 (1962); United States v. Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., 866 F.2d 242, 246 (8th Cir. 1988) cert.denied; 493 U.S. 809 (1989). In other words, the product market can be determined by analyzing how "consumers will shift from one product to the other in response to changes in their relative costs." SuperTurf, Inc. v. Monsanto Co., 660 F.2d 1275, 1278(8th Cir. 1981) District court did not err in determining that the same market and that defendant did not possess monopoly power in this market; the fact that there was a significant price differential between the two dialyzers was not the only factor to be considered in determining the relevant product market; with respect to plaintiff's anti-competitive conduct claim, the district court did not err in finding that Plaintiff failed to offer any evidence to support its allegations of predatory or anti-competitive conduct and that it also failed to show that defendant's conduct had a dangerous probability of success. HDC offered no evidence, other than a substantial price differential, to support the conclusion that single-use dialyzers are a distinct product market from multi-use dialyzers. Accordingly, we must affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on HDC's monopolization claim, because HDC failed to create a jury question on the issue of the relevant product market. United States v. Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., 866 F.2d 242, 246 (8th Cir. 1988) cert. denied; 493 U.S. 809 (1989)

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