Semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm officially launched its next-generation system-on-chip, the Snapdragon 820. (Photo : Reuters)
Qualcomm, a United States-based chipmaker, gets back to business and heightens up effort to curtail negative impact after having a record fine worth $975 million for antitrust violations in China, Sina’s tech news section reported.
Reports claim that the chipmaker's first aim is to start collecting royalties in China. The U.S. firm's clients have decided to delay paying their royalties, which may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, following the then-unsettled antitrust investigation.
Meanwhile, monitoring authorities outside China have also begun looking into Qualcomm's operations. For instance, the Fair Trade Commission in South Korea is currently investigating the firm for allegations about its abuse of its dominant position in the market.
According to analysts, Qualcomm charges the highest amount of royalties in the chip industry. The firm collects up to 5 percent of a mobile phone's wholesale price for 3G CDMA and 4G LTE technologies.
Some of the firm's competitors are adamant that the fine that China's regulator levied on Qualcomm is still relatively light.
Wang Yanhui, chair of the Mobile Phone China Alliance, said that the U.S. company was not even severely hurt by the lawsuit. His group was one of those who filed complaints before the National Development and Reform Commission.
Despite the record fine, industry experts predict that Qualcomm may still see continued revenue growth, as accounted by the shifting of telecom carrier China Mobile to wireless standard that is based from the firm's technology.
Over 100 million 4G LTE subscribers were added by China Mobile in 2014. This year, it is eyeing to have 200 million more.
"One of the lessons that we learned (as a result of the antitrust case) was that we probably weren't engaging as much as we should've been," Derek Aberle, Qualcomm's president, stated in a recent Boao Forum for Asia, as quoted by the Financial Times.
Aberle is positive that Qualcomm has already moved on and that the antitrust probe was only a part of the past. The company aims to further cooperate with Chinese manufacturers in the future.
