E.U. antitrust regulators impose a fine on Qualcomm for advancing its exclusive microchip deal with Apple.

Fiona Sydney

2018-01-17 05:30:00 Wed ET

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.

Blog+More

Neoliberal public choice continues to spin national taxation and several other forms of government intervention.

Peter Prince

2019-01-07 18:42:00 Monday ET

Neoliberal public choice continues to spin national taxation and several other forms of government intervention.

Neoliberal public choice continues to spin national taxation and several other forms of government intervention. The key post-crisis consensus focuses on go

+See More

Lyft seeks to go public with a dual-class stock ownership structure that allows the co-founders to retain significant influence.

Amy Hamilton

2019-03-11 10:32:00 Monday ET

Lyft seeks to go public with a dual-class stock ownership structure that allows the co-founders to retain significant influence.

Lyft seeks to go public with a dual-class stock ownership structure that allows the co-founders to retain significant influence over the rideshare tech unic

+See More

Tech titans from Apple and Amazon to Microsoft and Google can benefit from the G.O.P. tax reform.

James Campbell

2017-12-07 08:31:00 Thursday ET

Tech titans from Apple and Amazon to Microsoft and Google can benefit from the G.O.P. tax reform.

Large multinational tech firms such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon can benefit much from the G.O.P. tax reform. A recent stock research r

+See More

U.S. Treasury officially designates China a key currency manipulator in the broader context of Sino-American trade dispute resolution.

Becky Berkman

2019-09-15 14:35:00 Sunday ET

U.S. Treasury officially designates China a key currency manipulator in the broader context of Sino-American trade dispute resolution.

U.S. Treasury officially designates China a key currency manipulator in the broader context of Sino-American trade dispute resolution. The U.S. Treasury cla

+See More

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indexes from 2017 to 2024.

Dan Rochefort

2024-02-04 08:28:00 Sunday ET

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indexes from 2017 to 2024.

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indexes from 2017 to 2024. Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms the ma

+See More

Capital market liberalization and globalization connect global financial markets to allow an ocean of money to flow through them.

Becky Berkman

2018-06-17 10:35:00 Sunday ET

Capital market liberalization and globalization connect global financial markets to allow an ocean of money to flow through them.

In the past decades, capital market liberalization and globalization have combined to connect global financial markets to allow an ocean of money to flow th

+See More