price-fixing
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LCD price-fixing probe targets LG.Philips, Sharp, Samsung
A number of TFT LCD manufacturers are under investigation by government regulators in Asia and the US for possible price-fixing. LG.Philips was subpoenaed by American, Japanese and Korean authorities on Monday, while Samsung was hit with legal papers on Tuesday. Further, Sharp was "contacted" by the Japan Fair Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice, though it's unclear if that meant it got a subpoena too. But the fun doesn't stop there, reports IDG News Service, with the European Commission now getting in on the act, too -- the EC said that it was trying to "ascertain whether there is evidence of a cartel agreement and related practices concerning price fixing." Of course, this comes hot on the heels of that video card investigation we heard about recently, as well as the RAM price-fixing fiasco that Mitsubishi (and previously Samsung) were involved in. We'll keep you posted if other display makers get swept up into this.[Via Slashdot]
Feds tracking AMD/ATI, Nvidia in antitrust probe
The Merc reports about a federal antitrust probe -- the best kind of probe -- into the graphics-card industry. Nvidia and ATI -- through recent buyer AMD -- have been served with subpoenas asking for company documents that go back to the late '90s. The Justice Department wants records about "customers, product lines, competition, pricing of products, prices of competitors' products, market studies, and product volumes," according to Nvidia mouthpiece Michael Hara, as quoted in the article.The feds haven't described the exact nature of the investigation and haven't made any allegations, saying only that it relates to "anti-competitive practices." But the probe is most likely about collusion and price-fixing between graphics card companies. Basically, competing companies agree to set similar price points, keeping them artificially high, while limiting the affect of market forces to lower prices.Could this mean the beginning of the end of $600 -- or more -- enthusiast graphics cards? Have console prices been (slightly) higher because of artificial GPU costs? As consumers, we can only hope, but it'll take many months before we learn if the companies broke any laws.
Double trouble for SRAM makers: class action suit on the way
Things weren't looking so great already for those skeezy SRAM price-fixers, but now it looks like they'll have a class action lawsuit to worry about on top of all that DOJ heat they're currently facing. A certain Kenneth Bagwell of Michigan started up the class action suit, claiming the defendants conspired to "fix, maintain or stabilize prices and to allocate markets for the sale of SRAM." And Kenneth isn't screwing around. He's managed to name just about every SRAM manufacturer under the sun as in cahoots: Alliance, Cypress, Etron, GSI, Hitachi, Hynix, Integrated Silicon Solution, Micron, Crucial, Mitsubishi, NEC, Renesas, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Winbond, Fujitsu, IBM, Seiko Epson, Epson, Sharp and ST Microelectronics are all named as defendants of his own personal cash-in on this debacle. Mr. Bagwell already brought his suit to a Michigan district court, so now we just watch and wait for it all to hit the fan -- as if it hadn't already.
