In a ruling handed down on Wednesday 18 September (Case T-671/19), the General Court of the European Union has rejected the request by Qualcomm, a US company that manufactures chips for mobile phones and laptops, to cancel the €242 million fine imposed on it by the European Commission in July 2019 for abuse of a dominant position between January 2009 and December 2011 (see EUROPE 12299/15).
Disputing that it had sold UMTS chips at a loss in order to drive its main competitor, Icera (a British company bought by the American company Nvidia), out of the market, Qualcomm is pointing to procedural irregularities, manifest errors of assessment and a failure by the Commission to fulfil its obligation to state reasons.
In its judgment, the General Court dismissed the fifteen pleas put forward by the complainant, with the exception of one concerning the calculation of the amount of the fine. It believes that the Commission did not err in defining the relevant market, as the ‘small but significant and non-transitory increase in price’ test is not the only one that can be used. Nor, in its view, was the Commission required to consider whether the degree of market coverage by the contested practice, namely predatory pricing by a dominant undertaking, was sufficient to produce anti-competitive effects.
Nevertheless, in the General Court’s view, the Commission had departed without justification from the method of calculating the amount of the fine prescribed in the 2006 guidelines. The fine has therefore been reduced to €238.7 million.
See the Court’s judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/dgt (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)