Sources: EU regulators will not appeal a court ruling scrapping a €997M fine against Qualcomm for allegedly paying Apple billions to use only Qualcomm chips
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a seven-year arc that began with the European Commission's €997M fine over Qualcomm's alleged exclusive-chip payments to Apple in 2018. The General Court had already overturned the fine in June 2022, finding the Commission failed to assess whether the payments were actually capable of harming competition, and the fee rulings that followed confirmed Qualcomm as the prevailing party.
First-order effects
- The Commission's case is definitively dead: with no appeal to the Court of Justice, Qualcomm keeps the full fine rescinded and its exclusivity arrangement with Apple stands unpenalized.
Second-order effects
- The decision lands alongside the Court of Justice's reversal of Intel's once-record €1.06B rebate fine, leaving EU enforcers with two high-profile semiconductor dominance cases lost and a visibly higher evidentiary bar for exclusivity and rebate theories.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, future EU cases against dominant chipmakers will need transaction-level harm evidence rather than market-share arguments — reshaping how the Commission builds dominance cases and lowering the tail risk hanging over exclusive-supply deals across the industry.
The trend: EU antitrust enforcement against dominant semiconductor suppliers is being systematically unwound at successive court stages, forcing regulators toward stricter proof-of-harm standards.