On Thursday, the European Union's judiciary said it had sent another list of allegations to Qualcomm. Such documents usually take the preliminary conclusions of the regulator and explain the company's questions about the initial list of allegations.
The European Commission said: 'The additional statement of opposition issued today focuses on certain elements of the price-cost test adopted by the European Commission to assess the extent to which Qualcomm sells UMTS baseband chipsets at below cost.'
Since 2015, Qualcomm has been investigated by the European Union. At that time, Qualcomm was accused of “predatory” pricing between 2009 and 2011, pushing the British mobile phone software company Icera out of the market. Icera was subsequently acquired by Nvidia.
In January of this year, Qualcomm was fined 997 million euros in another case. Earlier, the European Commission said that Qualcomm violated EU regulations and paid Apple to use only Qualcomm chips to exclude competitors such as Intel.
Qualcomm expressed disappointment at the decision of the regulator to continue its investigation. Don Rosenberg, the company's general counsel, said in a statement: 'Although the scope of the investigation has narrowed, we are disappointed with the continuation of the investigation and will Immediately prepare for the response to this supplemental statement. We believe that once the committee evaluates our response, they will find that Qualcomm's approach is competitive and fully in line with European competition rules.
If it is convicted of violating EU anti-monopoly rules, Qualcomm will face a fine of up to 10% of global turnover.
The day before, the EU antitrust agency imposed a record $5 billion fine on Google.