South Africa's Competition Commission has referred Audatex South Africa (Pty) Ltd, a subsidiary of the US-based vehicle-technology group Solera Inc., to the Competition Tribunal for prosecution over alleged price discrimination in its vehicle repair estimation software. The Commission's 3 July 2026 media statement alleges that Audatex — whose software is used by insurers, assessors and panel beaters to calculate repair costs — charged small firms and businesses owned by historically disadvantaged persons (HDPs) up to roughly 50% more per quote than it charged larger customers between 2020 and 2024, conduct the Commission says is ongoing.
What the Commission Actually Alleges
The case rests on Section 9(1)(a)(ii) of the Competition Act 89 of 1998, which bars a dominant firm from price-discriminating against small and medium businesses or HDP-owned firms unless the difference is justified by actual cost-to-serve. The Commission's own PDF statement is specific: Audatex runs a volume-based tiered pricing structure — customers generating higher quote volumes pay lower per-quote fees, smaller firms pay more for the identical service — and the resulting gap "exceed[s] the Commission's safe harbour threshold of 10%," with some smaller customers paying "in excess of approximately 50% more than the average price charged to larger customers." The Commission opened its investigation in January 2025 and says Audatex's market position — the company states on its own site that its software processes roughly 81% of South African motor insurance claims, and BusinessDay reports it has operated in the country for more than 40 years — is what let the pricing structure stick. The Commission is asking the Tribunal to declare a contravention and impose a penalty of up to 10% of Audatex's annual turnover, the statutory maximum.
The Case for the Commission
Section 9's HDP-and-SME carve-out exists because South Africa's competition law is explicitly transformative, not purely efficiency-focused — the Competition Amendment Act of 2018 sharpened these provisions precisely to stop dominant firms from using scale to squeeze out smaller, often Black-owned, competitors who lack the negotiating leverage to win the volume discounts bigger players get automatically. If Audatex genuinely sits at the center of repair-cost calculation for most of the country's insurance claims, a small independent panel beater has no real alternative software to switch to — that's the textbook definition of a market where a dominant firm's pricing choices aren't really "choices" for the firms on the other side, they're take-it-or-leave-it terms. And the Commission isn't inventing a novel legal theory here: it is applying a bright-line 10% safe harbour that presumably already existed and was public before this case, which cuts against any claim that the rule caught Audatex by surprise.
Why the Theory Still Deserves Scrutiny
But there's a real tension the Commission's own statement doesn't resolve: volume-based pricing is not, in itself, exploitative — it's how nearly every B2B software vendor prices, from cloud computing to legal databases to point-of-sale systems. Bulk buyers get better per-unit rates because they cost less to serve (lower support-ticket overhead per transaction, more predictable revenue, cheaper sales and billing administration) and because sellers use volume tiers to win and retain large accounts. The Commission's statement acknowledges this defense exists in the abstract — Section 9(2) allows differentials that reflect real cost differences — but its own release states flatly that "a volume-based price differential is not a defence" here, without yet publishing the cost analysis that would show the 50% gap is disproportionate to any efficiency difference. That analysis will presumably come out in the Tribunal proceeding, and it should: a 10% administrative penalty on global-parent revenue is a serious sanction, and the public record so far is a prosecutorial allegation, not a Tribunal finding. Audatex has not yet filed a public response; BusinessDay reported it could not be reached for comment.
The Broader Signal
This is the kind of case competition authorities in more mature digital markets have mostly avoided touching, because "our biggest customers get the best rates" is close to definitionally true of any tiered SaaS pricing model, and turning it into a per-se discrimination violation risks discouraging exactly the volume discounting that helps price-sensitive small buyers in aggregate. South Africa's Section 9 carve-out is a deliberate policy choice to weigh equity considerations more heavily than a pure consumer-welfare competition standard would — that's a legitimate legislative call, not a mistake, and reasonable observers can back it while still wanting the Tribunal to show its cost-based reasoning rather than treat market dominance plus a pricing gap as automatically unlawful. If the Tribunal ultimately rules against Audatex on this record, every dominant B2B software vendor operating in South Africa — cloud providers, POS systems, ag-tech platforms — will need cost-justification files ready for ordinary tiered pricing, a compliance burden that is manageable for large multinationals like Solera and considerably less so for the mid-sized regional software firms competition law is nominally trying to protect.
What to Watch
The Tribunal has not yet set a hearing date. The key evidentiary question will be whether Audatex can show its pricing tiers track actual cost-to-serve differences, or whether the gap reflects pure market power. Either way, the ruling will set a precedent for how South Africa's price-discrimination provisions apply to software-as-a-service pricing more broadly — a test case worth watching well beyond the auto-repair industry.