As both companies have been discussed here recently, I thought people might be interested in a $1B lawsuit which Apple has filed against Qualcomm.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-lawsuit-qualcomm-idU…
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Apple accused Qualcomm of overcharging for chips and refusing to pay some $1 billion in promised rebates.
“If that were not enough, Qualcomm then attempted to extort Apple into changing its responses and providing false information to the KFTC in exchange for Qualcomm’s release of those payments to Apple. Apple refused,” Apple said in its lawsuit.
Of course QCOM called the claims “baseless” and shot back that they look forward to discovery, but some other notes from the article do cast a bit of doubt:
The KFTC fined Qualcomm $854 million in December for what it called unfair patent licensing practices.
In February 2015, Qualcomm paid a $975 million fine in China, while the European Union in December 2015 accused it of abusing its market power to thwart rivals.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm…
This seems like a big deal…not so much the 1B but the effect this might have on the Apple/Qcom relationship. I wonder what will happen to QCOM Monday. Looks like it dropped about 3% when the news came out in the last half hour of trading yesterday. I would imagine that’s not the full brunt of this.
Interesting to ponder whether this will benefit SWKS and/or others. Things seem pretty strained with this relationship…could Apple fire QCOM altogether?
Bear
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Interesting to ponder whether this will benefit SWKS
SWKS does not get its usual share of content with Qualcomm who prefer to use others (maybe because there are kick backs in place within Qualcomm’s supply ecosystem - I don’t know); as a result any loss in share for Qualcomm might well benefit SWKS.
Ant
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