Several years after Qualcomm was accused of antitrust practices–particularly when it paid billions of Dollats to Apple from 2011 to 2016 to only use its chips on iPhones–the US chipmaker won its fight against antitrust regulators in Europe. Qualcomm’s win meant that it will not need to pay the 997 million Euro fine imposed on them.
“A number of procedural irregularities affected Qualcomm’s rights of defence and invalidate the Commission’s analysis of the conduct alleged against Qualcomm,” the judges of the European Union’s (EU) General Court said on annulling the case filed by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager against Qualcomm.
“The Commission did not provide an analysis which makes it possible to support the findings that the payments concerned had actually reduced Apple’s incentives to switch to Qualcomm’s competitors in order to obtain supplies of LTE chipsets for certain iPad models to be launched in 2014 and 2015.”
This marks Vestager’s second big loss in the EU Antitrust Commission’s battle against big tech. Prior to this, they lost the battle on imposing a 1.06 billion Euro fine against Intel 12 years ago for its unfair competition practices against AMD 12 years ago.
The EU Antitrust Commission’s next big battle will be on September 14, where the General Court will rule on Google challenging the 4.34 billion Euro fine imposed against them for using Android to edge out its rivals.
