Recently, China's anti-monopoly agencies launched an antitrust investigation into Samsung, Hynix, and Micron's three memory chip giants. In the global DRAM market, the Big Three accounted for over 90% of the market share.
According to the report of the professional integrated circuit industry media set micro-net, the Chinese anti-monopoly agency conducted a sudden investigation on the offices of Samsung, Hynix, and Micron in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen on May 31. The three giants hampered fair competition and some The company's report prompted the Chinese anti-monopoly agency to initiate the investigation.
Since Q3 entered the price-raising channel in 2016, the price hike of memory chips has continued to this day, and it has been nearly two years. China is the world's leading consumer of memory chips. Due to the price increase of memory chips, China imported 88.921 billion memory chips in 2017. The U.S. dollar increased by 39.56 percent year-on-year to US$63.714 billion in 2016. By the end of 2017, in May 2018, the anti-trust agencies had separately discussed Samsung and Micron on the issue of price increases.
It should be pointed out that price monopoly behavior is a common market behavior in oligopolistic industries. Between 2005 and 2006, the US Department of Justice had ruled that Samsung, Hynix, Infineon, Elpida, and Micron had monopolised price behavior between 1999 and 2002. The first four companies were fined a total of 729 million U.S. dollars. Micron was the first to plead guilty and assisted in the investigation and was exempted from punishment. Of the 279 million U.S. dollar fine, Samsung’s sales penalty was 240 million U.S. dollars, accounting for US sales of 1.2 billion in 1999-2002. 20%.
According to the statistics of Micron, Samsung and Hynix Financial, the three companies’ semiconductor revenues in China were US$10.388 billion, US$253.86 billion, US$8.908 billion, and US$44.68 billion in total in fiscal year 2017, respectively, which was 32.1 billion yuan in the 2016 fiscal year. The dollar rose 39.16%.
In China, according to the “Anti-Monopoly Law” and “Anti-price Monopoly Regulations”, if operators have price monopolistic behaviors, they shall be punished in accordance with Articles 46, 47 and 49 of the Anti-Monopoly Law. Fines of 1%-10% of sales for the previous year, and the duration of violations needs to be considered.
If the three giants are found to have price monopolistic behavior and penalties are imposed on sales in China in 2017, then the fine will be between US$440 million and US$4.4 billion, and if the market behavior from 2016 to date is taken into account, 2016- 2017 annual sales penalty, then the penalty will be between 800 million and 8 billion US dollars.