On Thursday 16 June, Sony group companies obtained the annulment by the European Court of Justice of a European Commission decision under competition policy. The amounts of the fines imposed on them remain unchanged (Cases C-697 to C-700/19 P).
In a decision of 21 October 2015 C(2015) 7135, the Commission found collusive behaviour by several companies in the market for optical disk drives for laptops produced by Dell and Hewlett Packard. The cartels, contrary to Article 101(1) TFEU and Article 53 of the EEA Agreement, included parallel bilateral contact networks established by operators of several companies between at least 23 June 2004 and 25 November 2008. Commercially sensitive information was exchanged to manipulate tenders and keep prices artificially high.
The Commission fined the companies a total of €116 million.
Among the companies targeted that were not granted immunity, Sony Corporation, Sony Optiarc, Sony Optiarc America, Quanta Storage, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology and Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Korea brought an action before the EU General Court seeking the annulment of the Commission’s decision and the reduction of the fines imposed.
The General Court had rejected their claims on 12 July 2019 (judgment T-762/15).
On 20 September 2019, Sony Optiarc Inc. and Sony Optiarc America Inc. filed an appeal with the Court seeking to have the General Court’s judgment annulled.
On Thursday 16 June, the Court annulled the contested judgment and Article 1(f) of the Commission’s decision. In the Court’s view, the General Court made several errors of law. Contrary to the General Court’s considerations, the Commission violated the rights of the defence and failed in its duty to state reasons. The Commission did not give reasons for its decision to impute to the companies each of the behaviours imputed to them not only as a “single and continuous infringement”, but also as several separate infringements of Article 101 TFEU. The Commission considered that a single and continuous infringement necessarily validated its conclusions as to the existence of several separate infringements.
The amounts of the fines are maintained. The Court considers that the applicants have failed to demonstrate that the level of these fines was so disproportionate as to be excessive.
Link to the judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/269 (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)