Back in 2009, Intel was found guilty by the European Commission, and was forced to pay a fine of 1.06 billions of Euros for unfair competition. The company appealed but didn't succeded, and yesterday the fine was confirmed.

Intel says that there was no kind of unfair competition, and they are protesting against the decision made by the European Commission back in 2009. The Santa Clara firm noted that the evidence that they submitted were wrongly analyzed, and that the fine is too high.

To recap, Intel has been accused of unfair diffusion of their chips through HP, DELL, NEC and Lenovo notebook, using unfairly low prices. In addition of that, they made a deal with Media Saturn Holding, a german company, to supply their storage units only with Intel chips.

General Court of Luxemburg confirmed the initial sentence, and the 1.06 billion Euros fine along with that. If you think about this in perspective, the fine might be even too low, since it's only 4.5% of total income for the year 2008 of Intel, while the fine might have easily been around 10% of that amount.

Intel didn't say anything about what they are going to do in the future, but they are running out of choices, next time they'll be found guilty, they will have to pay.




Source: Reuters
via Le Comptoir du Hardware.