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Japanese Government Raids Intel Tokyo Offices
mordicus writes "Reuters
is reporting that Japanese Trade Officials have raided Intel's Japan Offices. From the article:
'Japan's fair trade watchdog raided the offices of Intel Corp's Japanese unit on
Thursday and a government source in Tokyo said the chip giant is suspected of violating
antitrust laws.' Japan seems to be rather vigilant in enforcing its antitrust legislation. Microsoft's Japanese unit was target of a
similar operation
less than two months ago."
Microsoft last month, Intel now.
So, who's for the chop in May then?
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
It's hard to declare Intel a monopoly (which is has to be if you are going to accuse it of monopolistic practices) when the latest numbers I've seen show AMD at 12% of the market and climbing, prior to this "invasion".
Do you know any Japanese company which has a >80% worldwide marketshare and has been abusing it?
And in other related news: Microsft, SCO and the RIAA have teamed up to counter this threat by sucking up all of the countries legal and technical resources in a frivolous and long-term legal battle. On a more serious side, it is about time a country gets tough on this subject. My biggest fear is that Japan will not be able to counter these international economic threats. The U.S. government was not even powerful enough to take on Microsoft. Their best bet is to cooperate in the Asian market with OpenSource. Have you ever seen or used Asian versions of Microsoft products? They are even worse than the American counterparts. It is no wonder they are feeling a bit angry. My prediction is that the Asian market is going to give BIG Corporate American business a big surprise in coming years.
Japan seems to be rather vigilant in enforcing its antitrust legislation.
Considering that Microsoft has probably been breaking antitrust laws for 10+ years, I wouldn't call this "vigilant".
Sony is like the Microsoft of Japan. Billboards dominate the streets. They certainly dominate the media and the advertising dollar there. Interesting how they would "raid" a US company who, to me, seems no more guilty than the dominant player there. It also lends creedance to revenge - seeing as Sony recently made a HUGE order of Transmeta Chips and didn't go with intel version of the ARM processor.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
IIRC, japan takes it's crime very seriously, compared to say.. the US (disclaimer: I'm a native of the USA). Criminals move with the expectation of being caught, because the cops in Japan are highly efficient, work selflessly, etc etc. I hear some figure about how criminals in Japan have a 80-90% chance of being caught, where as in the US, it's more like 20-30%.
Is it still that way?
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
You can't believe this is in the interest of fair trade, not in Japan, where business has the government firmly wrapped around its little finger? Surely you don't believe this was not at the behest of griping japanese electronics manufacturers who have had a difficult time competing with Intel on their home turf. This is the country that dumped consumer electronics and automobiles on the world, subsidized by taxing their own citizens. This is the country that negotiated hardball and grudgingly every millimeter of trade concessions for years.
When Japan, Inc. does things we like, like make handheld devices with Linux embedded, we applaud. When they do things we're less thrilled, we overlook. Japan, Inc. makes some damn fine stuff, but don't confuse that with government-industrial policies.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Antitrust laws are not only used against monopolies (which means it is already too late in some way), but also for anti-competitive behaviour.
It is best for the consumer if all those backroom deals and exclusive contracts disappear and the consumer has the free choice. That would be a concept, wouldn't it?
...of other nations, Japan makes no secret of the fact that they are a highly nationalistic country, and that they will do whatever it takes to protect their markets. Most other western industrialised nations are more fragmented and disingenous about it. Japan since WW2 and their rebuilding, sees economics as just another form of warfare basically, and acvts accordingly. They are polite about it, but ruthless. They are also really up the creek with the yen and the dollar, and are exploring different ways to ease the burden of supporting a still grossly over valued dollar. They have too many investments tied to it, but realise they needed major serious diversification like years ago, and are in max overdrive to rectify what to them is a national economic disaster in the making if it's not addressed past the lip service level. Same thing in the US, just we have.... stupider central bankers. They thought that they could keep pushing funny bux forever, like no one would ever notice. another subject there, but that is happening as well.
There's probably also a lot of other internal political action (politics=money, like any other place) going on around this, but I don't follow their internal affairs adequately enough to comment on it to any significant degree.
As an aside,I am also highly surprised that in this day and age that *any* intel chips get used in Japan.
It is best for the consumer if all those backroom deals and exclusive contracts disappear and the consumer has the free choice. That would be a concept, wouldn't it?
I think you'll find the land of the Zaibatsu wrote the book on backroom dealing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And its laws. American companies get away with far more than they should here. It wouldn't be surprising that they think the rest of the world is just as forgiving. For a company like Sony that has been created in Japan, they know what they can and cannot do inside and out. It makes sense that Japanese companies are not being busted, they probably all realise how harsh it can really be if they mess up. It's a learning lesson American companies will have to learn quickly. Ever wonder why the XBox has done so bad in Japan? It's because Microsoft cant get the leverage they can in other countries without breaking a metric ton of laws. Microsoft in turn has slammed Japan over and over saying they dont need them, etc .. While doing this, they've pretty much lost all respect for any Japanese developers jumping on the XBox2 ship. They've doomed their console hopes because they finally have to play fair somewhere and it bit them in the ass.
Read the book "intel Inside". The insider account of the culture of fear and paranoia fostered at Intel, with propaganda posters on the wall about how "it's nice to work at Intel", constant employee surveillance, the Randall Schwartz of Perl fame lawsuit, etc etc.
It's Orwellian nature makes it perfectly suited for Japanese culture. Should be a slam dunk. Except, as another slashdotter pointed out, the profits are rolling back to Andy Grove and his clan. The Intellies probably cut some deal with Taiwan and a Japanese company lost out, and before you know it, the offices are being raided.
With Intel's culture, a government raid is the biggest kick in the balls you could deliver. Start going through computer files and the network there, and people would be flipping out. What if they uncovered the AMD sabotage plot?
Do you know any Japanese company which has a >80% worldwide marketshare and has been abusing it?
Sony, Matsushita and Mitsubishi might count, they each have a huge corner in some market somewhere and have been pretty beligerent at times.
Mind you, we don't know if they're targeting japanese companies as well. This is news over here just because there're a american company involved. If there were a japanese company involved it wouldn't be news over, would it?
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
The fire at the resin plant was a total smoke-screen, it had a negligible effect on production or costs.
The DRAM shortage that occured at that time had a LOT of reasons associated with it, but the short version is that it all boiled down to supply and demand. Despite having a large chunk of the international DRAM market, none of the companies were making any money because prices were so low. So, to try and fix this, they decided to constrain the supply a bit. Supply goes down while demand was going up at the same time. End result? Huge increase in price. The resin plant fire was just a nice scapegoat to point blame at.
The Koreans broke the monopoly because they didn't worry about making any money. They figured that they would get marketshare first while their government propped the company up and then eventually start making money several years down the road. This worked fairly well for Samsung, who are now the worlds #1 memory manufacturer. It didn't work at all for LG Semiconductor or Hyundai Semi (now groupped together as Hynix). Both of those companies lost billions of dollars and they continue to lose billions of dollars, though the Korean government still props them up. Fairly recently they were found to violate some trade restrictions because of these government handouts and now need to pay fairly hefty levies to sell their products in the US.
In any case, while this is all slightly off-topic for the article, it is something that is going to be rather important to remember in the next 6 months or so. Several memory companies have announced plans to reduce production while at the same time advising that they will be unable to meet demand. In other words, they're doing it all over again, restricting supply in order to boost revenue (and maybe even make a profit, since most memory companies are not at all profitable). Expect memory prices to rise fairly significantly throughout the course of this year and don't be at all surprised if an earthquake in Taiwan or a resin plant fire in Japan is blamed for the hike.