Biostime, based in the southern city of Guangzhou, said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange that it would pay a fine of 163 million yuan “in a timely manner”.
The value is around six percent of the company’s sales revenue in the previous year the highest rate among all firms punished because its violations were “grave” and it “failed to rectify its wrongdoings in an active way”, the NDRC said.
Fonterra said it was fined 4.5 million yuan and accepted the decision.
Its chief executive Theo Spierings said all tainted products, which were distributed in countries ranging from New Zealand to Saudi Arabia, had been removed.
“All the stocks have been contained, everything is out of the market,” he told reporters in Auckland. “It’s in warehouses and there is little or no more risk for consumers.”
The NDRC said Dumex was fined 172 million yuan, Abbott 77 million yuan and FrieslandCampina 48 million yuan.
Chinese authorities are also investigating 60 foreign and domestic pharmaceutical firms over how they set prices.
In a high profile case last month they arrested four executives from British drug firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for alleged bribery and other offences.
Shaun Rein, the managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai, said authorities were right to bring down prices of vital goods such as baby formula and medicine.
“Prices on both have been spiralling out of control over the last 10 years,” he said.
Beijing tended to target foreign firms because “it scares everybody else into line” but avoided antagonising powerful domestic players.
But Rein argued that firms may have inflated baby formula prices partly as a marketing ploy to signal to consumers that they represented the quality and safety they sought.
The NDRC launched the dairy products investigation in March, mostly targeting overseas firms, and several of them announced price cuts last month.
Three companies — Wyeth, which is owned by Swiss giant Nestle, Japan’s Meiji, and Chinese firm Beingmate had been exempted from punishment, the NDRC said.
They provided important evidence and carried out active self rectification, it added.
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