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posted by janrinok on Thursday July 16 2015, @02:24PM   Printer-friendly

Qualcomm is under investigation by the European Union's antitrust authority, which suspects the company of abusing its dominant position in the market for 3G and 4G chipsets used in smartphones and tablets.

The European Commission has initiated proceedings against Qualcomm in two investigations, it said Thursday. The first concerns whether Qualcomm breached EU antitrust rules by offering financial incentives to phone manufacturers on condition that they buy chipsets exclusively, or mostly, from the company; the second, whether Qualcomm engaged in predatory pricing, selling below cost to force competitors out of the market.

Mobile processors and baseband chipsets, which handle the communications protocols used in wireless networks, form a significant proportion of the cost of a mobile phone and, at least at the low end of the market, margins are getting thinner, leaving phonemakers more vulnerable to pricing pressures from their suppliers.

The EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, said "We are launching these investigations because we want to be sure that high tech suppliers can compete on the merits of their products. Many customers use electronic devices such as a mobile phone or a tablet and we want to ensure that they ultimately get value for money. Effective competition is the best way to stimulate innovation."

Qualcomm's business practices have come under antitrust authorities' scrutiny before. Earlier this year, Chinese regulators fined Qualcomm $975 million for overcharging device makers there.

[...]

Qualcomm said it had been notified that the Commission had initiated proceedings against it in the two ongoing investigations. It will continue to cooperate with the Commission, but believes the concerns are without merit, it said.

More coverage of this story can be found at The Register and ITWorld.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @06:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @06:44PM (#210100)

    Qualcomm is the Intel or M$ of wireless communications tech. They own a ridiculous number of patents over wireless, and invented CDMA (at least for phones). No one else can come close because no one else owns the core patent portfolio for all these technologies.

    And that's just the stuff we know about. Companies started by ex-Qualcomm people can easily be found in a quick search that make stuff for the US Military. Compared to them, everyone else is running incredibly far behind.

    Just to top things off, Qualcomm has been very anti-FOSS (or open-anything--the pinout for the connector on the outdated Globalstar GSP-1600 satellite phone is STILL proprietary!) for as long as I can remember, so, yeah, they have this coming.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @08:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @08:28PM (#210155)

    How horrendous of them to actually invent tons of technology and be successful due to that How evil of them. If there's one way we should reward such companies its through investigations and fines.