By Susan Ning, Kate Peng and Chai Zhifeng
On August 27, 2013, MOFCOM announced its conditional clearance on MediaTek Inc’s (“MediaTek”) 4 billion USD acquisition of MStar Semiconductor Inc (“MStar“) (the “Transaction“). This is the second “hold-separate” case since this year (the other one is Xstrata/Glencore), and the forth one in China’s merger filing history. 1 MOFCOM appears to be getting more and more confident with the “hold-separate” arrangement as a behavior remedy to address competition concerns. It is also worth to note that the parties are required to submit detailed operation plan within three months of the decision and the transaction can only be closed after the detailed operation plan is approved by MOFCOM.