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Samsung’s Chief Financial Officer Dahm Huh attempts to shield his face while leaving the San Francisco state court in the U.S. on November 30. |
The world’s largest memory chip manufacturer has admitted to orchestrating a price-fixing scheme that harmed competitors and increased the cost of computers.
U.S. Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton has ordered the South Korean electronics giant and its subsidiary Samsung Semiconductor to pay $300 million in damages. This can be regarded as one of the largest antitrust penalties in history.
The trial in San Francisco is the result of a large-scale investigation that has been ongoing for three years (since 2002), uncovering the involvement of at least three of the largest DRAM chip manufacturers in the world today.
Earlier this year, Hynix Semiconductor (Seoul, South Korea) committed to paying $185 million, while rival Infineon Technologies AG (Germany) returned $160 million last year. A fourth chip manufacturer, Micron Technology (U.S.), has cooperated with prosecutors and may avoid facing penalties.
The court stated that these companies engaged in collusion, exchanging emails, phone calls, and numerous meetings to fix prices for DRAM, the memory chip used to store information in computers, printers, and many other electronic devices.
Victims of this scheme include Dell, Compaq Computer, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, International Business Machines, and Gateway. Dell and Apple had to raise PC prices to cover losses, while the remaining companies reduced the amount of memory installed in their systems to balance costs.
