2018-01-17 05:30:00 Wed ET
technology antitrust competition bilateral trade free trade fair trade trade agreement trade surplus trade deficit multilateralism neoliberalism world trade organization regulation public utility current account compliance
European Union antitrust regulators impose a fine on Qualcomm for advancing its key exclusive microchip deal with Apple to block out rivals such as Intel and TSMC. The European Commission takes into account Qualcomm's multi-year dominance in the LTE microchip market with rapid mobile broadband connections. In recent times, Qualcomm attempts to force Apple and its Asian upstream suppliers to use its trademark microchips exclusively in return for lower licensing fees.
Qualcomm can thus unfairly cut out intense competition in the LTE chipset market. In fact, Qualcomm pays billions of U.S. dollars to Apple such that it would not buy from other microchip producers.
These payments represent not just price reductions, but the primary condition that Apple would exclusively use Qualcomm's baseband chipsets in all its iPhones and iPads. Several other smart phone rivals such as Lenovo, OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi express an active interest in buying $2 billion Qualcomm chipsets over 3 years. No microchip rivals would be able to effectively challenge Qualcomm in this particular market regardless of product quality improvements.
The European Commission thus has to penalize Qualcomm for its anti-competitive market behavior. This E.U. regulatory decision has deep economic implications for Apple and other mobile device suppliers and manufacturers worldwide.
If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.
2018-06-03 07:35:00 Sunday ET

Several recent events explain why Trump may undermine multilateral world order. First, Trump withdraws the U.S. from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership
2025-06-20 08:27:00 Friday ET

President Trump poses new threats to Fed Chair monetary policy independence again. We describe, discuss, and delve into the mainstream reasons, conc
2022-10-25 11:31:00 Tuesday ET

Corporate investment insights from mergers and acquisitions Relative market misvaluation between the bidder and target firms drives most waves of mergers
2019-02-02 11:36:00 Saturday ET

The Trump administration teams up with western allies to bar HuaWei and other Chinese tech firms from building the 5G high-speed infrastructure due to natio
2018-11-15 12:35:00 Thursday ET

Warren Buffett approves Berkshire Hathaway to implement new meaningful stock repurchases. Buffett sends a positive signal to the stock market with the Berks
2017-11-29 07:42:00 Wednesday ET

The octogenarian billionaire and activist investor Carl Icahn mulls over steps to shake up the board of SandRidge Energy after the oil-and-gas company adopt