EU fines Qualcomm €997M for abusing market dominance, says it paid Apple to buy LTE baseband chipsets from Qualcomm exclusively; Qualcomm to appeal
The European Commission has fined Qualcomm €997m for abusing its market dominance in LTE baseband chipsets.
Context & Ripple Effects
This €997M penalty is the European Commission's opening shot in a multi-year campaign against Qualcomm's baseband-chipset business, arriving months after Taiwan's FTC imposed a $773M fine for at least seven years of antitrust violations and South Korea's regulator fined the company over $850M for tying overly broad patent royalties to modem chip sales.
The Commission doubled down a year and a half later with a €242M fine for selling 3G baseband chips below cost to squeeze out Icera — but the judicial arc ran the other way: the EU's General Court ultimately annulled the 2018 fine, regulators chose not to appeal, and a court later ordered the Commission to pay €786K of Qualcomm's legal costs.
First-order effects
- Qualcomm takes a near-€1B financial hit and commits to an appeal that will freeze the fine's finality for years, while Apple's exclusive LTE baseband purchasing arrangement is publicly recast as the product of alleged payments rather than chip merit.
Second-order effects
- Emboldened by the LTE case, the Commission extends its theory of harm to pricing conduct itself, fining Qualcomm again for below-cost 3G chip sales aimed at forcing Icera out of the market.
Third-order effects
- When the General Court sides with Qualcomm and the Commission declines to appeal, the precedent raises the evidentiary bar for treating exclusivity payments as abusive dominance — and forces enforcers to absorb litigation costs, shifting the risk calculus for future chipset-market cases.
The trend: Global antitrust authorities converged on Qualcomm's modem-chipset practices through 2016–2019, but Europe's courts have since narrowed how far dominance findings can reach into exclusive-supply deals.