While unsatisfactory, it cannot be argued that the private settlement of South Africa’s first-ever excessive pricing case defied corporate logic. In truth, the fact that the matter reached the point it did probably had more to do with force of personality and a desire for a legal precedent than with the core objective of lowering the cost of doing business in South Africa.

The case turned into a marathon, having been referred directly to the Competition Tribunal by gold-miners DRDGold and Harmony in 2004, after the Competition Commission decided not to refer the case, following its own probe of the matter, initiated in 2002.

But the miners were never the obvious candidates to take up the issue of alleged unfair pricing of flat steel by South Africa’s dominant steel group Iscor, now ArcelorMittal South Africa. However, those most affected and aggrieved were also those most worried about the consequences should they take on such a powerful corporate force. For that reason, Harmony’s former CEO, Bernard Swanepoel, emerged as the fight’s unlikely champion, driven by personal instinct to cut all costs – a crusade that had been core to the development of the company into a gold-mining force.

Once Swanepoel exited the Harmony scene, though, the appetite for fight was never as strong, and after the Competition Appeal Court’s decision to send the matter back to the tribunal for further interrogation, that appetite was weakened further. The court’s decision raised the prospect of yet more legal costs and executive distraction, which, in the context of falling steel prices anyway, was simply too much to bear.

So, was the whole case an “excessive” waste of time?

Well, there are a few reasons why I believe it wasn’t. Firstly, it gave all of corporate South Africa cause to look at their price-setting formulas, especially those employing import parity pricing in the context of surplus production. Secondly, I have no doubt that ArcelorMittal became far more restrained when it came to setting prices. The company has changed its formula, communicates price changes regularly and is today far more transparent about the reasons for price adjustments. Thirdly, the legal framework for what constitutes an excessive price is more or less in place. Yes, there are still some loose ends, but the tribunal and the court have provided a fairly tight set of parameters.

No doubt, these parameters will be looked at closely before the commission refers any future cases. Still, it claims that there will definitely be other such cases, and it may not be too long before the experience of the steel case is drawn upon in an attempt to solve this extremely important, yet complex, problem once and for all.