EU’s Qualcomm penalty largely upheld
In a separate ruling also issued on Wednesday, the General Court largely upheld a July 2019 Commission antitrust penalty on Qualcomm that had fined the mobile chipmaker €242 million (~$271M) for predatory pricing of baseband chips.
Qualcomm petitioned the General Court to annul the fine entirely or substantially reduce it. The Court largely upheld the Commission’s penalty, only slightly revising the fine down to €238.7M.
The chipmaker had raised 15 pleas in law challenging the EU’s penalty. The General Court rejected all of them except one concerning the fee calculation, which it accepted partially, finding that the Commission “departed, without justification, from the methodology laid down in its 2006 guidelines [for calculating fees].”
The ruling is likely to be a big relief for the Commission, which had an earlier Qualcomm enforcement quashed by the General Court in 2022.
The legal avenues for Qualcomm to challenge the Court’s latest ruling are limited to raising a point of law with the CJEU.