On June 17, 2022, the foreign media reported that five companies, including Toshiba, Sony, and Samsung Electronics, lost a major lawsuit.
Let us take a step back to the beginning of the conflict in 2015. In 2015, the joint venture between Toshiba and Samsung, also known as the Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, and Sony, Sony Optiarc, a joint venture between NEC and Sony and Quanta Storage, were accused of manipulating the purchase price of optical devices hence violating the competition rules. These companies were fined a total of 116 million Euros or $120.5 million by the European Commission.
The five companies filed an appeal against the accusations, which was dismissed in 2019. They appealed to the European Union Court of Justice (CJEU), but the Court ruled on Thursday that the accusations were justified and the fines were fine. They stated that the penalty should not be canceled or reduced. Nonetheless, part of the European Commission was repealed.
Although the five companies, including Toshiba and Sony, lost a lawsuit with the EU, Qualcomm, on the other hand, won an antitrust case with the EU. On Wednesday, an EU high court announced the invalidity of the European Commission’s ruling against Qualcomm in an antitrust case of 997 million Euros or about $1.229 billion.
Qualcomm’s defense rights were affected by the European Commission’s procedural irregularities, the court noted, and the Commission’s analysis of Qualcomm’s alleged conduct was rejected.
