U.S. Samsung executive accepts plea bargain

An American executive at Samsung, the world’s largest chipmaker, agreed to serve jail time after pleading guilty to the price-fixing of memory chips, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Thomas Quinn of Samsung Semiconductor Inc, the U.S. subsidiary of the Korean chipmaker, has agreed to serve eight months in prison and pay a $250,000 fine. He also agreed to cooperate in the department’s ongoing investigation into the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) market. The plea agreement must still be approved by the court. Quinn is the fourth Samsung executive to serve time in the United States. Three foreign-based Samsung officials pleaded guilty earlier this year to the same charges and were fined the same amount. Four officials of Hynix Semiconductor, the world’s second largest company in the DRAM industry, have also agreed to prison terms and fines. According to the one-count felony charge filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court, Quinn conspired with employees from other chipmakers to fix the prices of DRAM units sold to original equipment manufacturers between April and June 2001. He is also accused of coordinating bids on a Dec. 5, 2001 Sun Microsystems auction. His actions directly affected sales to U.S. competitors such as Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq and IBM, the department stated. “Prison time for price-fixers remains the most potent deterrent to illegal cartel activity,” claimed Thomas Barnett, assistant attorney general in the antitrust division, as he made the announcement. Scott Hammond, the antitrust division director of criminal enforcement, said that this case is only one in an ongoing effort to bring executives of DRAM manufacturers to justice for their anticompetitive behavior. DRAMs are one of the most commonly used semiconductor products, with applications in personal computers and laptops and other consumer electronic goods.