Infineon Technologies Admits to Price fixing.

[Acanthus]

German computer chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG has agreed to plead guilty to price fixing and will pay a $160 million fine, the Justice Department (news - web sites) announced Wednesday.


In a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Infineon acknowledged conspiring with other companies to fix prices of widely used computer memory products between July 1999 and June 2002.


The victims included some of the world's largest computer companies ? Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Gateway.


The fine is the third-largest imposed in a criminal case by the Justice Department's antitrust division. The 1999 breakup of a vitamin cartel led to a $500 million payment by Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. and $225 million by BASF AG.



Source: Yahoo

 

[ViRGE]

Frankly, I'm still in shock over this. After the Rambus fiasco, I don't understand how these companies thought they could get away with this, considering what happed to Rambus legally and reputation-wise. I'm seriously considering not buying any Infineon-based products in the near future, however unlikely that may be.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
Frankly, I'm still in shock over this. After the Rambus fiasco, I don't understand how these companies thought they could get away with this, considering what happed to Rambus legally and reputation-wise. I'm seriously considering not buying any Infineon-based products in the near future, however unlikely that may be.

The main issue with this is it isnt just micron, all of the big 5 are being investigated for conspiring together to fix prices.

If you read the full article, part of them pleaing guilty is to rat out the others they conspired with.

 

[SickBeast]

It's pretty disgusting, isn't it? I'll bet that by now we would all have 2GB of system memory had this nonsense not occured. Hopefully Celestica here in Toronto will start to produce DRAM again, that way I can bypass these corrupt fools.

I personally feel stolen from as I have purchased over 2GB of RAM in the past year.

 

[Tbirdkid]

This is crooked business. I thought too that there would be some serious ramifications behind this if it were proven true. I think this may be why Schumacher and his lenchmen left infineon. At least they are smart enough to know to say yea we did it. Now lets square up and move on....

 

[stickybytes]

was this the reason why prices on corsair memory suddenly sky rocketed a few months ago?

 

[T9D]

No wonder the prices have been so high for so long. They just never seem to drop.

 

[NFS4]

Anandtech, March 2004

 

[n7]

Wow.

That's some messed up crap :|

 

[SickBeast]

So why haven't prices dropped if people have been aware of this issue since 2002? It seems that these crooked business practices have been allowed to continue.

 

[MetalMusicMan]

wow, that's amazing... will this or has this affected the price of corsair xms?

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: MetalMusicMan
wow, that's amazing... will this or has this affected the price of corsair xms?

No, this article is talking around 99-02, largely focusing on when the i845 was introduced. It's not believed that they're currently fixing prices.

 

[usernamemax20charact]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: MetalMusicMan
wow, that's amazing... will this or has this affected the price of corsair xms?

No, this article is talking around 99-02, largely focusing on when the i845 was introduced. It's not believed that they're currently fixing prices.

Yeah, right.

I'm sure we'll see DRAM price fall in a few weeks, though not too significantly.

 

[udonoogen]

i should sell that extra ram i have in my other box now

 

[araczynski]

you know what's really shocking? that people are surprised by this. this is par for course in business today, companies don't get filthy rich by being respectful to their consumers.

they may be successfull, but shareholders don't want successfull companies, they want filthy rich ones.

its the stupid consumer that keeps taking it up the a*s all the time and is too stupid to realize this.

they paid 160million fine, whoopdy doo, how many hundreds of millions of profit were they still left with?

with hundreds of millions in profits even after this slap on the wrist fee what incentive do they have to not do this again down the line? or the other companie to follow suit.

i'm sure infineon's lawyers/owners are laughing all the way to the bank. most of these large companies figure fines/patent suits/lawyer fees/etc into their pricing anyway, if they get caught then its business as usual, if not, then a handfull of people get new yachts for xmas.

wake up people.