Antitrust

Lieff Cabraser represents a proposed class of consumers who have filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that Synta and Ningbo Sunny (the owners of Celestron and Meade) conspired to fix prices and monopolize the consumer telescope market in the United States.

While there are a quarter million amateur astronomers in the U.S., most if not all amateur astronomers did not realize that the manufacturers and distributors of their telescopes were engaged in price fixing, market allocation, and other anticompetitive activity with the purpose and effect of monopolizing the consumer telescope manufacturing and distribution markets. As a result, purchasers of consumer telescopes have been illegally overcharged hundreds of millions of dollars for telescopes since at least 2005.

Synta and Sunny together manufacture over 80% of all consumer telescopes imported into the United States. As the complaint sets forth, however, instead of competing, Synta and Sunny agreed which products their companies will produce and what prices to charge for such products. They used their unlawful cooperation and dominance over telescope supply to enable their subsidiaries to take over the United States distribution market in violation of the antitrust laws.