Intel broke a fine record after being penalized with almost one and a half billion dollars by the E.U. for using unfair sales tactics in the computer chip market. The only ones happy about the fine were the people from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel’s number one rival, who sued them and requested regulators to review Intel’s tactics over a number of years.
The president of AMD and chief executive officer, Dirk Meyer, said he is looking forward to a world where the market is ruled by customers and not by huge corporations such as Intel and that this is the first step towards regaining a competitive market where customers could be presented with a range of options from which they could decide.
E.U. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes claimed that Intel did nothing but harm millions of European consumers as it eradicated competition and kept its rivals out of the market. The commission demanded Intel to effectively shut down all sales practices in Europe, but it wouldn’t reveal exactly what those were. On the other hand, Intel didn’t know what hit them but agreed to comply while they appeal the fine.
Opposed to all the other parts of the computer industry, microprocessors have only two manufactures, AMD and Intel, the last one holding almost 80 percent of the market nowadays.
The last big corporation to have been fined such a large amount of money was Microsoft, with a considerably $1.3 billion, received last year from E.U.
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