Yes, apparently so, as Samsung, the largest maker of memory chips in the world, will pay $300 million fine for being guilty of conspiring with its rivals in the $7.7 billion US market & fixing prices and thus cheating customers, the result of a three year investigation by the Justice Department, Yahoo! reports. 👿
Two of Samsung’s rivals, South Korea-based Hynix & Infineon Technologies AG of Germany, have already pledged guilty for crimes that lead to price hikes in computers between 1999 & 2002, and have paid fines of $185 million & $160 million respectively. The penalty on Samsung is the second largest criminal antitrust fine ever in the US.
They are all accused of conspiring via emails, telephone calls & face-to-face meetings to fix prices of the memory chips from April 1999 to June 2002. The chips besides computers are used in all sorts of gadgets like mobile phones, printers, digital cameras etc. And the victims of price fixing were Dell Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Apple Computer Inc., International Business Machines Corp., Gateway Inc. and ofcourse their respective customers.
In my opinion, these people should be hanged!! 👿