News EU slaps Intel with record £948m fine

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/05/13/eu-slaps-intel-with-record-948m-fine/1

As expected, the EU has slapped Intel with a record fine for abusing its dominant position in the market. It found Intel guilty of antitrust on two counts.

 

Hot damn.

That is one big fine.

 

that is certainly more than i'll ever make

however relatively speaking is that really a major dent in their income considering how much they make in a year ?

 

Even for someone like Intel, a billion quid? That's gotta hurt.

 

They do turnover around $37 billion a year to put that into perspective

 

Where does the money go that intel gets fined for?
Also, it's a bit of a bad time to get fined that much.

 

True, but their net income for Q4 2008 was $234 million. If they continue through 2009 as they did at the end of 2008, the fine wipes out their income for over five quarters. Not a good time to be Intel at any rate.

 

...That's an even bigger number.

Well, comparatively speaking that's not that much, really. Ahwell.

 

Almost 4% of their annual turnover is huge, considering that their profit will be a lot less than the turnover.

 

Given that they're already planning to appeal the decision, I expect it will go down, probably by a lot, and if it doesn't, then I doubt there'll be an order to pay it one lump sum.

 

Not sure if appealing will help to be honest, the EU have excellent form in this sort of thing and their cases are often watertight. What you may see is Intel offering to meet some of the antitrust requirements early or even withdrawing from certain ongoing negotiations to the advantage of AMD, VIA, etc. Only then would the fine possibly be reduced.

Either way it's going to hit Intel rather hard but to be honest it's about time.

 

AMEN!

I think they are getting off easy. The charges are severe, basically they were holding the entire market hostage: OEMs, retailers, competitors, customers, everyone. And they have been doing so for a good number of years. The maximum fine that the EU can give is 10% of yearly turnover, so the nuber could have been almost four times higher. And even then, they are only counting the turnover for one year, not every year that this has been going on...

Anyway, 1B pounds is a good enough kick in the nuts for now i suppose. Now let's see how much damages AMD will claim after this.

 

Desktop wise I stopped buying Intel since the 486 days, however my last 2 laptops have been intel wich wasnt by choice, just because laptop as a whole was a good price or spec.

 

Good to see Intel being pegged back for shady practices. Lets just hope a decent chunk of the fine goes to AMD to allow it to get some more R&D done to get the next gen of cpus somewhere near the core i7 range.

In addition with the fluctuations in the money market that are currently occurring Intel could save themselves a large chunk of cash by paying when the dollar to euro rate is at it's most preferable.

 

are AMD going to see a penny of this?

 

That's how Microsoft got their fine reduced, they released versions of XP without things like WMP and IE bundled in. I doubt Intel will just say "can we make it lower please?" and the EU going "Ok" without them meeting them halfway.

 

Everyone asks this, the answer is no.
AMD filed a complaint with the authorities, and the authorities stop the behaviour per a fine (this one).

Now that the fine has been given (and the behaviour documented), AMD can file a claim at a civil court to retreive damages.

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2009/05/13/intel-ceo-responds-to-eu-ruling/1

Intel has responded with a statement from CEO Paul Otellini

 

Here's a transcript from a briefing call just held with Bruce Sewell, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Intel...

 

He's complaining about the fine being arbitrary. Isn't the point of a fine that it is arbitrary. Does he not understand the difference between a fine and damages.

Also, is not most of that statement completely irrelevant, other than the fairly weak defence in the third and fourth paragraphs.