Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) were told on September 28 that part of a consumer class action against them can proceed, after a ruling by Britain’s Competition Appeal Tribunal.
The claim concerns a 2018 arrangement that allegedly restricted which sellers could list Apple and Beats products on Amazon’s UK marketplace. Amazon closed Monday at $246.15 and Apple at $338.40.
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The Claim is Too Small to Matter to Either Company:
The surviving portion of the claim is valued at between £289 million and £306 million, including interest. Amazon is worth about $2.7 trillion and Apple close to $4.9 trillion. Even a total loss would not register in either company’s results.
The tribunal narrowed the case considerably. Claims covering Apple products bought directly from Apple or from other retailers were thrown out, with the judge describing the reasoning behind them as a complex and speculative theory of harm.
So this is the smaller version of the case, brought on the second attempt after an earlier filing was refused last year over concerns about the proposed class representative and its funding.
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The Real Risk is to How Amazon Polices its Marketplace:
The claims the tribunal allowed through are the ones aimed at the marketplace itself. Judge Kelyn Bacon described them as “plausible, credible and grounded in the facts”, which is a low bar for certification but not a meaningless one.
The allegation is simple. Two companies agreed on who could sell a product, and buyers paid more as a result. Amazon’s marketplace is central to its economics. Third-party sellers pay fees, and advertising revenue attaches to those listings.
Any legal test of who Amazon may exclude from that marketplace, and on what terms, reaches further than one product category in one country.
Britain has also built a collective action regime that allows large consumer claims to be aggregated, and both companies have faced claims under it before. A ruling that lets one case proceed makes the next filing easier to bring.
Apple said it strongly disagrees with the claims. Certification only means the case will now be heard. The timing is awkward for Apple in one respect. It arrives days after a United States jury ordered the company to pay about $5.7 billion in an unrelated patent case, so the legal column is filling up even though neither matter threatens the business.
Conclusion:
The financial exposure here is negligible for two companies of this size, and the tribunal removed the larger part of the claim before letting the rest go forward. However, the part that survived goes to how Amazon governs its marketplace rather than to one distribution deal signed in 2018, and that is the question with a longer tail. Britain’s collective action regime rewards claims that clear this stage, so the ruling matters less for what it costs and more for what it invites. Certification is not a finding of liability, and both companies will contest it, but the case now proceeds on the ground least comfortable for Amazon.
Market Sentiment:
Amazon.com, Inc. was held by 369 hedge funds with a combined stake value of about $97.1 billion at the end of Q2 2026 in the Insider Monkey database. This is up from 353 hedge fund holders with a cumulative investment value of around $77.6 billion in the previous quarter.
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This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
