Qualcomm faces yet another antitrust dispute

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Qualcomm faces yet another antitrust dispute

A Korean technology company said yesterday that it has lodged an antitrust complaint with the nation's regulators against Qualcomm Inc., accusing the San Diego-based company of abusing its market dominance. The complaint by the Seoul-based Thin Multimedia Inc. is the latest in a series of antitrust disputes surrounding Qualcomm in Korea, with local handset manufacturers and mobile phone software companies grappling with what they call excessive royalties paid to the U.S. wireless chipmaker. "Qualcomm's antitrust behavior of selling its mobile phone chips bundled with software has had a harmful effect," said Yoo Yeon-sang, a spokesman at Thin Multimedia. The company filed the complaint with the Fair Trade Commission earlier in the day, he said. Thin Multimedia, which develops multimedia software for cellular phones, criticized Qualcomm for hindering fair competition in the market by forcing mobile phone manufacturers to buy both its mobile phone chipsets together with software. By exploiting its status as the only supplier of code division multimedia access, or CDMA, chipsets, Qualcomm has allegedly forced the handset manufacturers to buy its four mobile video software products, dubbed QTV series, which are designed to deliver TV and other media via wireless handsets, Yoo said. "Unless Qualcomm stops such unfair business practices, local cell phone software companies will be pushed into bankruptcy," the company said in a statement. An official with the Fair Trade Commission confirmed it had received the complaint from Thin Multimedia, but declined to elaborate. Qualcomm's Korean unit spokesman Kim Seung-soo wasn't immediately available for comment. In April, another Korean mobile phone software company lodged a complaint with the antitrust agency over alleged unfair market practices by Qualcomm, prompting the regulator to search the U.S. company's Seoul office. Qualcomm owns most of the key patents for CDMA technology, the second most widely used wireless network standard in the world behind the global system for mobile communications. Korean handset manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc. are major clients of Qualcomm. Last October, six telecommunication equipment makers, including Texas Instruments Inc. of the United States and Nokia Oyj of Finland, asked the European Commission to investigate Qualcomm, blaming the company for collecting "unfairly excessive" royalty fees.
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