Taiwan Fines Qualcomm $773 Million for Antitrust Violations
by Nate Oh on October 12, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- SoCs
- Legal
Qualcomm’s global legal issues continue, as the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission (TFTC) fined the company roughly $773 million (NT$23.4 billion) for illegal licensing and chip pricing practices. This development is yet another antitrust filing levied onto Qualcomm, which has recently seen fines from South Korea (December 2016) and China (February 2015), a lawsuit from the US Federal Trade Commission (January 2017), and investigation and potential non-compliance fines from the European Union.
The official TFTC statement states that Qualcomm withheld products and licensing in order to force clients to agree to its conditions, noting Qualcomm’s numerous standard-essential patents (SEP) and monopoly status in the baseband processor market for the CDMA, WCDMA, and LTE spaces. The TFTC found that these actions and others violated antitrust laws for at least seven years, during which Taiwanese companies paid Qualcomm around NT$400 billion (~$13.2 billion) in licensing fees and $30 billion in baseband processors purchases. Essentially, these findings match the US FTC’s charges of Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy and their refusal to license standard-essential patents.
In addition to the fine, the TFTC is demanding Qualcomm cancel agreements and clauses where competitors were forced to disclose sensitive company data, including prices, product model names, shipments, sales targets/volumes, and customer names.
In the meantime, Qualcomm remains enmeshed in a series of interconnected lawsuits with Apple, with the most recent development occurring just a few months ago.
In response to the TFTC ruling, Qualcomm released their own statement disagreeing with findings and stating plans to appeal the decision. Since appealing against South Korean regulators, this marks the second time Qualcomm is appealing such antitrust fines.
Source: Bloomberg
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
9 Comments
View All Comments
cwolf78 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Where there's smoke...JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
You know what they say... 'All toasters toast toast'.FreckledTrout - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
You can't un-toast toast.BinaryTB - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Exynos and Mediatek... Intel isn't doing ARM, Nvidia is concentrating on Switch, Apple is its own thing, so that leaves two companies that make Android chips, correct? Even Exynos is Samsung-only I think.I guess that real question is, how will this affect Android phones? More expensive if Qualcomm charges more or more variety of CPU/Modem since Qualcomm can't charge more for licenses?
peevee - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
It is not about ARM cores (which is done by way more than 2 companies and not really hard if you license from ARM as even Qualcomm does now). It is about LTE modems and patents.Kevin G - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Intel is doing ARM, just not for cell phones. They're including ARM cores in some FPGA designs.prisonerX - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
There is no such thing as a "Android chip." Android can run on anything. This issue is not about ARM chips but wireless baseband modules, which are entirely unrelated.vladx - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link
This is why I'll never buy a Qualcomm based gadget ever, besides Exynos and Kirin are competitive enough.webdoctors - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link
Wow, thats a huge amount of NTD! Funny the max for poisoning a country is only $50M NTDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Taiwan_food_sca...
But ripping off modem licensing agreements can be billions.