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Published: September 6, 2017 | Source: Politico.eu | Author: Mark Campbell

Intel wins a retrial over their €1.06 Billion fine from the EU commission

Intel wins a retrial over their €1.06 Billion fine from the EU commission

Intel wins a retrial over their €1.06 Billion fine from the EU commission

 
Intel has managed to get a retrial against the EU for their anti-competition case which concluded in 2009, giving the company an opportunity to potentially lower this fine as the EU’s general courts examine all of Intel’s arguments. This decision was made by the EU’s highest courts this morning. 
 
This ruling will lead to another year or more of litigation and has the potential to deliver a different outcome than the previous ruling. The European Court of Justice had this to say in their statement to the press. 
 
 
The General Court was required to examine all of Intel’s arguments … which the General Court failed to do,
 
The Court refers the case back to the General Court so that it may examine, in the light of the arguments put forward by Intel, whether the rebates at issue are capable of restricting competition.

 

In the original case, Intel was found to have been giving rebates to manufacturers like Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and NEC between 2002 and 2007 on the condition that at least 95% of their systems shipped with Intel CPUs and had “restrictive conditions” imposed on the other 5%. This prevented AMD from overcoming their rivals, preventing them from gaining any market share, despite the fact that they introduced the market’s first X86 64-bit CPU back in 2003 and released the first dual core CPU in 2005. 

During this investigation, Intel was also found to have made payments to the retailer Media Markt on the condition that they only sold Intel-powered PCs. This prevented AMD from even selling their PCs at this retailer, making them unable to compete with Intel.

 

Intel are still fighting against the EU's $1.2 Billion antitrust fine

  

This court case has now taken over eight years to resolve, with this new ruling allowing Intel to go unpunished for their misdeeds for what will be a full decade. 

AMD has only recently risen as a true competitor to Intel this year with their release of their Ryzen CPU architecture, with the past decade otherwise being exceptionally unkind to the company given Intel’s dominant market position and vastly superior R&D budgets.  

 

You can join the discussion on Intel’s upcoming retrial over their anti-competitive practices on the OC3D Forums. 

 

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