South Korea slaps Qualcomm with record-setting $850M fine
South Korean regulators say that Qualcomm's patent-licensing methods violate Korean unfair competition laws, and the company must pay a fine of 1.03 trillion won, or about $850 million or £695 million. Qualcomm has said it will fight the massive fine in court.
The Korea Fair Trade Commission, or KFTC, held that Qualcomm refused to license certain standard-essential patents on its chips to rival chipmakers including Intel, Samsung, and MediaTek. The commission ordered Qualcomm to renegotiate those licenses in good faith, according to a Reuters report on the matter. The fine is the largest ever issued in Korea.
In its report on the Korean fine, Bloomberg notes that Qualcomm makes most of its profits, about $6.5 billion in its most recent year, from selling the rights to its chip technology. Qualcomm "has violated its agreement to license patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, known as FRAND," the Commission said in a statement.
