Qualcomm has received an additional Statement of Objections (“SoO”) from the European Commission within the framework of a predatory pricing investigation involving the sale of the so-called UMTS baseband chips at below costs to edge out competitors. These chips are core components of mobile phones that allow the transmission of data and voice in 3G communication.
A first SoO was sent to the chip manufacturer in 2015, when the Commission expressed its concerns that Qualcomm was abusing its market power to push its competitor Icera out of the market between 2009 and 2011. The investigation started following a complaint from Icera itself, which was bought by Nvidia Corp in 2011.
According to the Commission, this supplementary SoO focuses on certain elements of the “price-cost” test to assess the extent to which UMTS baseband chipsets were sold by Qualcomm at prices below cost.
Qualcomm was already ned EUR 997 million in a separate case in January 2018, when the Commission considered that Qualcomm infringed EU Competition Law by paying iPhone Apple to use only its chips in an e ort to foreclose the market to its competitors.
