Samsung fined for price fixing

[Toonces]

Article

Samsung, the world's largest maker of memory chips for computers and other electronic gadgets, has agreed to plead guilty to price fixing and pay a $300 million fine, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The penalty is the second-largest criminal antitrust fine ever and caps a three-year investigation into the largest makers of dynamic random access memory computer chips, a $7.7 billion market in the United States.

 

[spidey07]

wow. That's huge.

According to the article they were all in it.

 

[ajpa123]

Originally posted by: spidey07
wow. That's huge.

That's what all the girls say :shocked:

 

[Billzie7718]

Hahah ... I worked for Samsung Telecom. All my old co-workers emailed that to me.

 

[Homerboy]

can I get a refund back for all the RAM I bought when it was a billion dollars a MB?

 

[DarkKnight69]

Originally posted by: spidey07
wow. That's huge.

According to the article they were all in it.

price fixing does not work if one company does it...

 

[Phokus]

I don't get it, if samsung was fixing prices, wouldn't another memory chip maker step in and replace them? It's not like they have some sort of monopoly on memory chips...

 

[Kelemvor]

Damn...

Samsung's top competitor, Seoul-based Hynix, agreed earlier this year to plead guilty to price fixing and pay a $185 million fine. Last September, rival Infineon Technologies AG of Germany agreed to a $160 million fine. Another competitor, Micron Technology Inc. of Boise, Idaho, has been cooperating with prosecutors and was not expected to face charges.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: DarkKnight69

Originally posted by: spidey07
wow. That's huge.

According to the article they were all in it.

price fixing does not work if one company does it...

It depends. I've seen price fixing from a single manufacturer (we won that one) before. It was Sun Microsystems. They were in cahoots with the major resellers.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Phokus
I don't get it, if samsung was fixing prices, wouldn't another memory chip maker step in and replace them? It's not like they have some sort of monopoly on memory chips...

If you get everybody else (or the major players) to maintain prices at an inflated level.....price fixing.

 

[Koenigsegg]

Wasn't IBM invovled in something like this a long time ago? Or am I completely delusional?

 

[kleinwl]

What is crazy about this is Dell and IBM and the other PC makers are considered the vics. That means that they have a chance of getting a slice of the fine. That's silly. All their customers are the vics... Dell and those guys just passed the costs along.

Also, do you think that 300M is sufficent a fine? I have to wonder... at 512MB ram running $50 a stick and 50M+ computers being built... the fine might/should have been much larger.

 

[Coquito]

I would like a partial refund on those $130 512 sticks I always had to buy.

 

[PlatinumGold]

so what about OPEC?? they don't price fix?

 

[silverpig]

If I was Samsung I'd offer a $200m payment. If they refused, I'd sue THEM for price fixing