Qualcomm Receives A Fine Of $773 Million For Antitrust Violations
Qualcomm has been fined a whopping NT$23.4 Billion (around 773 Million USD) by the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission. They are accused for violating the regulations about the pricing policy of their smartphone chips & patents. According to the reports, Qualcomm was actually violating antitrust for about 7 Years & in this time period they have collected about NT$400 Billion in total from local companies which is a pretty big amount.
In their staement the Taiwanese regulator said, Qualcomm has monopoly market status over key mobile phone standards and by not providing products to clients who don’t agree with its conditions, the U.S. company is violating local laws. They also mentioned that, Taiwanese companies had purchased $30 billion worth of Qualcomm baseband chips.
“Qualcomm holds big number of standard essential patents in CDMA, WCDMA and LTE segments and is the dominant provider of CDMA, WCDMA and LTE baseband chips,” the FTC said. “It abused its advantage in mobile communication standards, refused to license necessary patents.”
If you remember Qualcomm recently filed a complain against Apple where they made the company pay a huge amount for using their patents without even licensing them. This time the fingers are raised towards themselves & that’s definitely not what we expect from them.
Alongside the fine, the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission has also instructed Qualcomm to remove previously signed deals that force companies to provide the prices, the customer names, the shipment details, model names and other sensitive information as well as other clauses in its agreements.
Well, we know that most of the big companies have done some sort of law violations in the past & looks like Qualcomm is the new addition to this list. So what are your thoughts on these Antitrust Violation attempts by Qualcomm ? We have a comment section below where you can let us know.
Source: Bloomberg Tecnology
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