Luxembourg (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – The General Court of the European Union rejected Intel Corp.’s appeal against a €376.4 million EU antitrust fine but reduced the fine to €237.1 million.
The Luxembourg-based court stated that it found the new amount to be
“a more appropriate reflection of the gravity and duration of the violation at issue.”
“An amount of 237,105,540 euros is a more appropriate reflection of the gravity and duration of the infringement at issue,”
the court said.
The European Commission imposed in 2009 a €1.06 billion fine on American chipmaker, Intel, for infringing antitrust regulations by
“engaging in illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude competitors from the market for computer chips called x86 central processing units.”
The case centered on Intel’s rebates, conditioning large purchases on exclusivity, which the Commission viewed as predatory to maintain ~70-80% market share.
What evidence gaps weakened the original Commission case?
Citing insufficient evidence of anticompetitive effects in the Commission’s analysis, the EU General Court reversed the fine. In that decision, the court found that the Commission’s economic and “as-efficient competitor” analysis was either inconsistent or insufficient to prove that Intel’s conditional rebates actually limited competition.
After that initial decision was rejected in part by the EU’s General Court, focusing on the aspects that withstood judicial scrutiny, the Commission adopted a new decision in 2023 that focused on the practices not annulled by the EU court and imposed a new fine of €376.4 million on Intel.
Similar antitrust cases involving abuse of dominance through loyalty rebates or exclusionary practices have been pursued by the European Union against a number of tech giants; these cases frequently mirror the Intel x86 CPU rebate dispute.
How does Intel’s case compare to Google’s Android ruling?
In its 2018 Google Android antitrust case, the European Commission fined Google €4.34 billion for restricting Android forks, using revenue-sharing agreements to secure search exclusivity on mobile devices, and linking the Google Play Store to the pre-installation of Google Search and Chrome.
Google’s anti-competitive restrictions on Android OEMs from 2011 to 2018, which included payments to guarantee Google Search as the default, bans on customized Android forks, and mandatory bundling of Google Search and Chrome with the Play Store, were the source of the €4.34 billion fine.
