One of the world’s largest chipmaker Qualcomm, which has already seen a drop in profit by 90% as the legal battle with Apple continues, has recently been fined $1.2 billion by the European Union for violating antitrust laws in a series of deals with Apple, as reported by Europa. The US-based chipmaker is accused of paying the Cupertino company billions of dollars during the year 2011 to 2016 to exclusively use its 4G chips in the iPhone and iPad.
The EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager showed his serious concerns over the corruption made during the deals between the two giants. She believes that this is illegal under EU antitrust rules and that’s why they have taken this decision. According to Vestager,
“This meant that no rival could effectively challenge Qualcomm in this market, no matter how good their products were.”
.@Qualcomm to pay fine of €997 mio. They illegally shut out rivals from market of LTE baseband chipsets for over 5 years. Misuse of dominant position. Don’t.
— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) January 24, 2018
Bloomberg reports that Vestafer has a point of view that the penalty booked for Qualcomm will serve as a warning to other tech companies. The EU’s antitrust commission began investigating this case back in 2015 and said the fine represented 4.9 percent of Qualcomm’s revenue in 2017.
The commissioner points out that although Qualcomm is the world’s largest supplier of LTE baseband chipsets, yet there are other chip manufacturers active in the market. The chipset supplier Intel has tried to challenge and compete with Qualcomm for customers. Apple began using Intel’s modems in its iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices after its agreement with Qualcomm ended.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm is not new to facing troubles like fines from regulators and lawsuits. Qualcomm has earlier been sued by Apple for overcharging them for the use of basic patents.
