News

Qualcomm taking legal action against four Apple suppliers

The chip manufacturer is suing the four firms not only for the payments themselves, but also for additional costs. In addition, Qualcomm wants the court to declare that the amounts are legally payable even if payment is not received immediately.

In the latest development in the ongoing war between chip supplier Qualcomm and Apple, the former has sued four iPhone suppliers for “breaching their license agreements”. The company has already brought charges against Apple itself before.

The whole problem began when the FTC claimed that Qualcomm has, for all practical purposes, given itself a monopoly by threatening to charge Apple higher patent royalties if it sourced baseband processors from other manufacturers.

Apple reacted by suing Qualcomm in several countries including the UK and US. Qualcomm responded in turn with its own lawsuit, attempting to get iPhone imports blocked and claiming that the company’s suppliers were holding back nearly $1 billion in arrears royalties.

Qualcomm refuses to give up even with Samsung siding with Apple.



Reuters has since named the four suppliers as Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron and Compal Electronics. Qualcomm confirmed yesterday that it has sued the four firms for failure to pay royalties.

According to a statement issued by the chipmaker, all four companies acknowledge they owe money, but Apple has ordered them not to pay. Qualcomm have said: “While not disputing their contractual obligations to pay for the use of Qualcomm’s inventions, the manufacturers say they must follow Apple’s instructions not to pay.”

The chip manufacturer is suing the four firms not only for the payments themselves, but also for additional costs. In addition, Qualcomm wants the court to declare that the amounts are legally payable even if payment is not received immediately.

Don Rosenberg, executive Vice Presdent and general counsel of Qualcomm, had this to say:
“As Apple continues to collect billions of dollars from consumer sales of its Qualcomm-enabled products, it is using its market power as the wealthiest company in the world to try to coerce unfair and unreasonable license terms from Qualcomm in its global attack on the company.”

Before you go

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

mac-pc

Tags

About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

You can also follow me on: and

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.