Fuming Qualcomm smashed with 23 BILLION DOLLAR fine in monopoly abuse probe

Trade officials in Taiwan have hit American chip designer Qualcomm with a NT$23.4bn (US$774m) fine for abusing its dominant position in the wireless electronics world. The California biz, which is the brains behind the Snapdragon cellular broadband modem chips used in gadgets globally, was found to have strong-armed phone …

[tcmonkey]

Oh dear...

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. Here's hoping that Broadcom get a similar taste.

[PhilipN]

23 B

Tch! Tch! El Reg. Markets have been roiled many a time by such (playfully or not) misleading headlines.

I hope Google News’ crawler reads the sub-heading too.

[Mark 85]

Re: 23 B

Well, in this case it might be worth the fun watching Qualcomm's stock tank for a day or so... Yeah, the smart stock market types will suck up Qualcomm's stock in a heartbeat if that should happen since they know it will recover in few days/weeks and they (the stock sellers) will make a nice chunk of change.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 23 B

Human traders wouldn't be fooled by this, it would only hit high frequency program trades. I have absolutely no problem with misleading headlines causing them to screw up and lose a bunch of money!

[John Smith 19]

So a good day for High Frequecy MnM traders with a headline like this.

Seems the old "Microsoft Tax" wheeze (or cousins of it) are still popular in IT land.

[chasil]

Intel

Intel's purchase of Infineon places it in the top 5 GSM chipset providers (I believe).

A quick deal by Qualcomm buying access to Intel's fabs is likely in order. A goodwill gesture to bundle Intel's modem with a Krait (aarch64-variety) would do much to assuage the regulatory anger. Some careful Qualcomm engineering attention to Intel's discrete modem chip that brings the GSM performance closer to Snapdragon would likely satisfy Apple.

Qualcomm has the power to broaden access to mobile - their CDMA patents lock them as to sole supplier for Verizon, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular. Regulators are demanding "coopetetion," and this is not unreasonable. Qualcomm needs to execute on monetizing their patent portfolio in a way that is friendly to all market segments and allows competitors to survive.