Judgment_paragraph 34 · Pierre Fabre Dermo-Cosmétique SAS v Président de l’Autorité de la concurrence and Ministre de l’Économie, de l’Industrie et de l’Emploi (C-439/09)

34It must first of all be recalled that, to come within the prohibition laid down in Article 101(1) TFEU, an agreement must have ‘as [its] object or effect the prevention, restriction or distortion of competition within the internal market’. It has, since the judgment in Case 56/65 LTM [1966] ECR 235 been settled case-law that the alternative nature of that requirement, indicated by the conjunction ‘or’, leads, first, to the need to consider the precise purpose of the agreement, in the economic context in which it is to be applied. Where the anticompetitive object of the agreement is established it is not necessary to examine its effects on competition (see Joined Cases C-501/06 P, C-513/06 P, C-516/06 P and C-519/06 P GlaxoSmithKline Services and Others v Commission and Others [2009] ECR I-9291, paragraph 55 and the case-law cited).