The EU announced today the application of a record fine for the company Qualcomm, its amount being 997 million dollars, and the reason is bribing Apple not to use the products of its competitors. The EU claims that Qualcomm paid Apple several billion dollars not to use competitors' modems in iPhone phones and iPad tablets, and here the big losers are those from Intel and MediaTek.
The EU claims that through its actions, the Qualcomm company affected the ability of competing companies to generate competition on the modem market for mobile phones and tablets in recent years. Qualcomm had revenues of 20 billion dollars during 2017, so the fine imposed by the EU represents 5% of the company's total revenues, but of course it is not final and can be challenged in the European courts.
According to the contracts based on which the EU imposes this fine, if Apple had produced a single iPhone model without a Qualcomm modem, the Americans would have had to return the billions of dollars received and pay compensation. Of course, Apple had to gain from this collaboration and certainly benefited from preferential prices for the modems used in the iPhone and iPad, but Qualcomm is the one who made a mistake, in the end.
"EU antitrust regulators slapped a 997 million euro ($1.23 billion) fine on US chipmaker Qualcomm on Wednesday for paying Apple so that the iPhone maker only used its chips, blocking rivals such as Intel. The European Commission said its investigation, launched in 2015, covered the period from 2011 to 2016 and took into account Qualcomm's market dominance in LTE baseband chipsets, which enable rapid 4G mobile connections."
Apple received money from Qualcomm for the last 5 years to use 4G LTE modems in the iPhone and iPad, but during this 5-year period it explored the possibility of contracting with other companies, finally choosing Intel in 2016. The fine that Qualcomm has to pay it in this situation is impressively high, but depending on the appeal that will be made against it, the amount could decrease significantly, it could even be canceled.
