Report: Beijing watchdog reckons chip-slinger Qualcomm has monopoly in China

Beijing’s anti-competition authority, currently midway through a probe of Qualcomm, has reportedly said it believes the chipmaker does have a monopoly in China. The chip giant has been under investigation by the National Development and Reform Commission for allegedly overcharging and abusing its market position in China, a …

[DavCrav]

Really, Qualcomm? Whom did you forget to bribe?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese government is striking against US companies it can't beat

It beats some - Baidu (and the firewall) has made Google rather irrelevant from a search perspective in China, piracy has neutered Microsoft. It keeps Apple at bay through the press accusing them of various things, but they're a pretty small percentage of the Chinese mobile market anyway.

They haven't found a way to beat Qualcomm yet, designing your own mobile chipset is not at all easy, and even using home grown standards like TD-LTE for in-country if they want to sell their products to the rest of the world they need to use others' patents on LTE, GSM, etc.

So let's accuse them of being a monopoly (which they are) and abusing it (questionable) and threaten them with huge fines. The thing is, if they're accusing them of charging too little for their patents, what is the remedy - let's fine them but then make them charge more for their patents to make up the difference? I don't understand the logic here...

I'm rather surprised they haven't ever tried to strike Intel in this way - maybe Intel quietly came to some sort of arrangement, or maybe they're next on the hit list.

[Aitor 1]

Re: The Chinese government is striking against US companies it can't beat

Mediatek?

Cheaper, almost as powerful.. but terrible GPS, single channel and nointegrated 4G.

I know they just introduced MT6595 and MT6795 .. but too late...

[Henry Wertz 1]

Also Samsung

My older Samsung Stratosphere had a Samsung LTE chip, and a Via (CDMA/EVDO) 3G chip. Surprisingly no Qualcomm whatsoever. The Stratosphere 2 I have now uses a Qualcomm chip.

Here's what Qualcomm do -- they do heavy amounts of R&D to develop the newest features for their next chipsets, and they patent any new techniques they come up with. They will license these patents out to anyone (and apparently it's "all or nothing" so they aren't holding back on the good stuff...), but the cumulative R&D costs of actually implementing your own chip must be pretty high because very few vendors have implemented their own chipsets, and those that do seem to go back to Qualcomm chips. I think by market share they could easily be considered a monopolist, but I think they are a natural monopoly and are not anticompetitive at all.