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Nine Chip Makers Fined $400M In EU For Price Fixing

Posted by samzenpus on from the collective-swindling dept.

eldavojohn writes "In a disturbing case for average consumers, nine DRAM chip manufacturers have been fined more than $400 million for price fixing. The named companies are Samsung, Hynix, Infineon, NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Elpida, and Nanya. A tenth company, Micron, avoided fines by reporting the other nine to the authorities. Since all companies cooperated with the probe, they received a 10% reduction in fines, so it could have been worse. The US DoJ has had its own history with chip makers and LCD makers in price fixing scandals."

2 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. ban one company at random by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I say rather than fines, we ban one of those companies from the US market forever. We repeat this process ever time there is price fixing incident. Shareholders of those companies will not tolerate the risk and management will be too scared to pull this shit again.

  2. Re:Disturbing? by purpledinoz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is this the same price fixing that occurred when Intel tried to shove Rambus, a crappy, expensive, proprietary RAM technology down our throats? And they colluded to LOWER their prices to kill Rambus? In my opinion, they did us all a favour. If Rambus became the "standard", we would be paying a lot more money for memory now.