Recently, the State Administration for Market Regulation released the 'Draft Compliance Guidelines for Pricing Strategies in the Automotive Sector' to gather public feedback. The 'Guidelines' explicitly point out that, apart from lawfully lowering prices to clear out overstocked inventory, automotive manufacturers that engage in practices like setting the factory prices of whole vehicles or components below their production costs with the intent to drive out competitors or monopolize the market, or indirectly reducing prices through tactics such as offering high-end products at low-end prices, providing discounts and subsidies, opting for in-kind payments instead of cash, shipping more goods than the amount invoiced (thus making the actual factory price lower than the production cost), as well as submitting unreasonably low bids in tenders, all carry substantial legal risks.