Qualcomm Reportedly Under Investigation By South Korean Fair Trade Commission Over Anti-Trust Issue

Qualcomm may be the leading mobile chip manufacturer and have their chips placed inside of tons of different devices, but that apparently doesn’t make them exempt from any sort of practice that can be looked at negatively. According to an unnamed source of South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission and reported on by Maeil Business Newspaper of South Korea, the South Korean Fair Trade Commission(which deals with anti-trust issues in the country)is currently investigating Qualcomm over potential abuse of their dominant market position as the top mobile chip maker. The same commission reportedly fined Qualcomm for this very issue years ago back in 2009 for a total sum of $200 million USD.

Whether or not Qualcomm is doing the same thing again remains to be seen as the source would only comment that Qualcomm was being looked at for the matter. As part of the investigation the South Korean Trade Commission will have to ask questions to some of the region’s leading smartphone manufacturers which use Qualcomm’s chips inside of their devices, which of course includes top brands and rival competitors Samsung Electronics and LG. Maeil also apparently states that Intel Corp., will be included in the investigation as they’re a direct rival to Qualcomm in the mobile chip space, although they have only recently in the last few years been making their way into the mobile market.

If this investigation is truly happening, it won’t be the only investigation Qualcomm has had to deal with lately as they had recently finished with a previous investigation that lasted 14 months, that was conducted by the Chinese government over anti-trust issues, which prodded into the U.S. chip makers licensing practices. Neither Qualcomm nor the South Korean Fair Trade Commission have officially commented on the investigation at this point in time. Qualcomm is the U.S. leading mobile chip manufacturer based out of San Diego, CA. and is currently developing the Snapdragon 810 chipset which is scheduled to be in a handful of this year’s high-end flagship devices, including rumors of it powering the Galaxy S6, the LG G4, and has already been confirmed to be inside of LG’s G Flex 2 which was announced earlier this year at CES last month.

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