Toyota Motor Corp.’s China unit was fined 87.6 million yuan ($12.5 million) for price fixing in eastern Jiangsu province, China’s market regulator said Friday.

The Jiangsu Administration Bureau for Market Regulation found that between 2015 and 2018 Toyota set a minimum sale price for its premium Lexus cars in several cities in Jiangsu province, depriving dealers of pricing autonomy and harming competition.

The leading Japanese automaker’s local unit also took a number of measures to impose price controls, such as cutting supplies to dealers selling at lower prices for certain models, the regulator said.

Toyota said the company respects the regulator’s decision.

Toyota is the seventh automaker fined for price fixing since China’s anti-monopoly law came into effect in 2008. In June, China’s market regulator imposed a 162.8 million yuan fine on Ford Motor’s joint venture with Changan Automobile Group for violating law.

Price fixing in the auto industry has been a recurring problem in China as enforcement of the anti-monopoly law has been selective and the penalties are relatively low, said Liu Xu, a researcher at Tongji University’s Research Center of Intellectual Property and Competition Law.

Unlike the European Union, where violating automakers are fined based on the parent companies’ global sales in the previous year, China calculates fines based only on sales in the region where the violations took place. In Toyota’s case, the fine was based on 2% of Toyota’s China unit’s sales in 2016.

Contact reporter Denise Jia (huijuanjia@caixin.com)