Key Points
- EU court upholds Qualcomm’s €238.7 million antitrust fine, reduced slightly from €242 million.
- The fine was related to Qualcomm’s below-cost sales of chipsets from 2009-2011, which were intended to undermine Icera.
- Most of Qualcomm’s appeals were rejected, except for a small adjustment in the fine calculation.
- In 2021, Qualcomm won an appeal against a €997 million fine for exclusivity deals with Apple.
Europe’s second-highest court largely upheld a European Union antitrust fine against U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm on Wednesday, lowering the penalty to €238.7 million ($265.5 million) from the original €242 million imposed by the European Commission in 2019. The fine was issued after the EU found that Qualcomm engaged in predatory pricing by selling its chipsets below cost from 2009 to 2011, aiming to eliminate competition from British phone software maker Icera, now part of Nvidia.
The European Commission had argued that Qualcomm’s actions were intended to prevent Icera from gaining a foothold in the 3G baseband chipset market. The court agreed with this assessment, rejecting most of Qualcomm’s appeals, but it did reduce the fine slightly due to an adjustment in the penalty calculation.
Qualcomm had defended its case by pointing out that the chipsets involved accounted for just 0.7% of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) market, arguing that they couldn’t block competitors in such a small segment. However, the General Court dismissed this claim, concluding that Qualcomm’s actions constituted antitrust violations.
In its statement, the Luxembourg-based General Court said, “A detailed examination of all the pleas put forward by Qualcomm [was conducted], rejecting them all in their entirety, with the exception of a plea concerning the calculation of the amount of the fine, which it finds to be well-founded in part.”
Qualcomm still has the option to appeal the decision to the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU. However, the company has not yet commented on the court’s ruling.
In a separate case in 2021, Qualcomm convinced the same court to annul a €997 million antitrust fine. The European Commission imposed an earlier fine for paying Apple billions between 2011 and 2016 to exclusively use Qualcomm’s chips in iPhones and iPads, which prevented rivals like Intel from competing.
