EU Makes it Official – Qualcomm Wins

EU Makes it Official – Qualcomm Wins
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​Four years ago the European Commission ruled that between 2011 and 2016 Qualcomm (QCOM) had paid Apple billions of dollars to gain exclusivity as the supplier to the iPhone and iPad product lines and fined the company $1b, leading to a very extended appeal process that seems to have finally ended. The recent ruling, which stated that “A number of procedural irregularities affected Qualcomm’s rights of defense and invalidates the Commission’s analysis of the conduct alleged against Qualcomm,” all leading to the conclusion that it was not proven that the Qualcomm payments reduced Apple’s incentive to switch to other suppliers during the 2014 and 2015 years.
The EU has been considering appealing the decision in Europe’s highest court, the EU Court of Justice, but it seems that EU regulators have decided not to appeal the decision, leaving Qualcomm off the hook for the $991m fine.  The current ruling left little in terms of room for an appeal, as the judges were considerably critical of the way in which the EU handled the prosecution, which was part of the EU’s crackdown on big technology companies that included a billion dollar fine for Google (GOOG) and investigations into the practices of Facebook (FB) and Amazon (AMZN).  Next week the General Court will rule on a challenge to the ~$4.4b fine also imposed on Google under the allegation that the company used the Android OS to keep competition at bay.