Mere days after suing Qualcomm for roughly $1 billion USD in the U.S., Apple has now launched two additional anti-trust lawsuits against the chipset manufacturer in Beijing, China.
Apple is alleging that Qualcomm is abusing its dominant position in the chip industry and seeking $1 billion yuan (approximately $190 million CAD) in the first suit. In the second, it accuses Qualcomm of failing to license standard or essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (known as ‘FRAND’ terms).
“These filings by Apple’s Chinese subsidiary are just part of Apple’s efforts to find ways to pay less for Qualcomm’s technology,” retorted Qualcomm executive vice president and general counsel Don Rosenberg, in a statement to Reuters. “Apple was offered terms consistent with terms accepted by more than one hundred other Chinese companies and refused to even consider them.”
The company noted, however, that it had not yet seen the full complaints filed in the Chinese court.
Apple is a major buyer of Qualcomm’s modem chips. Together with Samsung, the two companies make up 40 percent of Qualcomm’s $23.5 billion in revenue in the most recent fiscal year, according to Reuters’ report.
News broke on January 20th, 2017, that Apple was suing Qualcomm for similar anti-trust practices in the U.S. Along with those filings, Apple stated that Qualcomm is “charging for royalties for technologies they have nothing to do with,” further adding: “Despite being just one of over a dozen companies who contributed to basic cellular standards, Qualcomm insists on charging Apple at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined.”
Apple is not the only entity to recently raise such concerns. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission charged the chipset maker with “monopolizing a key semi-conductor device used in cell phones” on January 17th, 2017 and South Korea levied a $1.1 billion CAD fine against Qualcomm in December 2016 for abusing its dominant position.
[source]Reuters[/source]
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