In December 2016, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) found that Qualcomm hindered competition in licensing patents and selling smart phone chips and announced that it will issue rectification orders for certain specific acts and place approximately 1.03 trillion won (about 898 million won US dollars) for administrative fines.
In February 2017, Qualcomm filed two prejudices against the South Korean High Court, which demanded the revocation of the KFTC's ruling and secondly, it requested a moratorium on KFTC's chip licensing revisions until the first appeal was announced.
In September last year, the Seoul court dismissed Qualcomm's second appeal, claiming KFTC's ruling would not "irreparably damage" Qualcomm's business and required Qualcomm to rectify its monopoly in the South Korean market. Subsequently, Qualcomm Announced the appeal to South Korea's supreme court again.
Qualcomm did not disclose the terms of the revised agreement but said the new agreement is consistent with the pricing of Qualcomm's global handset licensing policy.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm and Samsung have said they have reached a multi-year strategic partnership on Qualcomm processors, including 5G technology. With the introduction of a new generation of very high speed wireless networks in the next few years, major equipment manufacturers and network operators are ready to adopt This network.
According to Jiwei.com, Qualcomm held a technology summit in Beijing last week, inviting almost all important Chinese partners, including SMIC, China Mobile, Lenovo, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, ZTE and other bigwigs full stage to help out, hand-painted 5G win-win road blueprint.
Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights, a research firm, said the new deal between Qualcomm and Samsung is "surprising." The new partnership with Samsung is important as it lowers Qualcomm's uncertainty, Certainty made Qualcomm share price pressure in the past year.In addition, the new agreement also strongly countered Broadcom's allegations that Qualcomm's business model has lapsed, "Mohede said.
It can be said that with the "bad" to describe Qualcomm's current situation is not an excuse.In addition to facing the antitrust allegations in South Korea, Taiwan and the European Union, the patent battle between Qualcomm and Apple is not over. With this At the same time, Qualcomm is also facing a hostile bid from rival Broadcom, once the deal is reached, it will become the largest acquisition in the history of science and technology.
Earlier, some sources even disclosed that if the acquisition is completed, Broadcom plans to shut down Qualcomm's patent licensing business after a period of time because the business led to too much friction between Qualcomm and customers over the years, Qualcomm has been the iPhone and iPad baseband The sole supplier of chips, and now Apple is more autonomous design of components, resulting in these chip companies seem more like competitors, rather than supply chain partners.
At the technology summit last week, partners including Lenovo, ZTE, vivo, OPPO and Wentech actively affirmed Qualcomm's focus and feelings in the field of communications and made it clear that the future may be due to the acquisition of Broadcom Certainty concerns.
Broadcom's acquisition of Qualcomm will usher in a vote from Qualcomm shareholders in March when Broadcom approached and Qualcomm, at the end of last year, notified Qualcomm of the nomination of 11 new directors. At such a crucial time, at the most important Chinese market in the future , So many important customers made it clear that the equivalent of a message to Broadcom, that customers want to maintain the status quo, the will to operate independently, while giving confidence to investors.