The European Commission fines Qualcomm for abusing its dominant position

The European Commission has fined Qualcomm a € 997 million fine for abusing its dominant position in the market after having paid billions to Apple to exclusively use its chips.

Qualcomm is fined for monopoly

Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, director of competition policy said that Qualcomm illegally closed its rivals in the LTE baseband chipset market for more than five years, for which in 2011 it paid billions of dollars dqualcomme to a key client such as Apple., to prevent it from using chips from its rivals. This agreement between the two companies has lasted until 2016.

First benchmarks of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 670

Apple had seriously considered the possibility of changing part of its chipset to Intel, but the condition of exclusivity was a material factor of why it decided not to do so, since the agreement had a clause by which Qualcomm would stop paying money to those of Cupertino in the time when they will use network chips from another manufacturer.

In 2015, the European Commission opened two antitrust investigations into possible abusive behaviors by Qualcomm, it is expected that in the coming months the conclusion of the second investigation will be announced, regarding the accusations of predatory prices.

Unfortunately it is not the first time nor will it be the last one that a case like this occurs, we all remember that Intel was also fined to pay a significant amount of money to AMD for using abusive practices with the computer manufacturers that it prevented from mounting the processors. from Sunnyvale's company.

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