The European Commission recently issued a dissenting statement to Qualcomm Inc. to conduct an in-depth investigation into the company’s alleged monopolistic market behavior. The analysis generally believes that the EU has put a 'high price' ticket on Google’s company, followed by a 'gun’ ' Aligning with Qualcomm, this 'combination boxing' is closely related to the escalating trade conflict between Europe and the United States. As the US's tariff measures against the EU continue to increase, the days of American technology giants in the EU are clearly not as comfortable as they used to be.
The statement said that the letter was a procedural step to investigate Qualcomm in accordance with EU antitrust rules. After receiving an allegation from a major competitor of Qualcomm, the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation into Qualcomm in December 2015. In the statement of opposition issued to Qualcomm at the time, the European Commission focused on whether Qualcomm sold chipsets at below cost to crowd out competitors. The recently added objection to the statement focused on Qualcomm at a price below cost. The extent to which the baseband chipset is sold.
According to previous investigations, the EU has issued a 'penalty ticket' to Qualcomm. The European Commission announced in January this year that Qualcomm and Apple reached an agreement: between 2011 and 2016, Apple only used Qualcomm-provided chips in return, Qualcomm pays a large fee to Apple. If Apple uses Qualcomm's competitor chips, Qualcomm will cut its huge investment in Apple. This monopolistic behavior is a serious violation of EU regulations and undermines the principle of fair competition in the EU market. For this reason, the EU decided to impose a fine of 1.229 billion US dollars on Qualcomm, which is equivalent to 4.9% of Qualcomm's 2017 turnover.
If the EU is convinced of Qualcomm's new investigation, Qualcomm will face a huge fine of up to 2.3 billion US dollars. According to EU regulations, the upper limit of anti-monopoly fines is 10% of global turnover, Qualcomm's 2017 global revenue is about US$23 billion. The EU's judiciary recently stated that it has sent a list of allegations to Qualcomm. The analysis concluded that such documents usually take the preliminary conclusions of the regulatory body and explain the company's questions about the initial list of allegations.
Although the EU claims that the additional statement of opposition issued this time is only a 'routine procedure', but as the US-European trade conflict escalates, public opinion generally believes that this is a counterattack of the EU's response to the US imposed tariffs.
It is worth noting that the day before the additional investigation of Qualcomm, the EU issued a 'high price' ticket to Google. The European Commission announced that it found that Google Inc. abused the Android operating system and installed Google by default in the system. Search, thereby strengthening their dominant position in search engines to crowd out other competitors. To this end, the EU decided to impose a fine of 4.34 billion euros on Google, setting a record for anti-monopoly fines. This is the year that Google received the EU. The second huge amount of fines, in the context of the current European and American trade confrontation upgrade, this matter is quite intriguing.