Text 16376, 116 rader
Skriven 2007-02-21 10:51:38 av Ellen K. (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: Suit: Intel paid Dell up to $1 billion a year not to use AMD chips
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From: Ellen K. <72322.1016@compuserve.com>

<sigh>

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 20:02:32 -0500, mike <mike@barkto.com> wrote in message
<hb9ft2p6dqhr4h91kutkqilf9hoecbim2k@4ax.com>:

>
>http://money.cnn.com/blogs/legalpad/2007/02/suit-intel-paid-dell-up-to-1-billi
on_15.html
>
>===
>Potentially devastating antitrust accusations against Intel (INTC) were
>buried inside a recently filed shareholder suit against Dell Inc.
>(DELL). Though the Wall Street Journal did write about the suit here,
>the allegations do not seem to have attracted much attention. Maybe the
>suit got overlooked because it was filed the same day Dell CEO Kevin
>Rollins quit, and founder/chairman Michael Dell retook the company's
>reins. Or maybe people are just understandably skeptical of naked
>accusations contained in shareholder suits brought by class-action
>impresario Bill Lerach. (See earlier feature or post on Lerach.)
>
>Still, the charges Lerach leveled in federal court in Austin on January
>31 are hard to ignore. For one thing, they are tantalizingly
>detailed--describing, for instance, the goings on at "weekly server
>group staff meetings" and "quarterly server group town hall meetings" at
>Dell--suggesting that a Dell insider might be cooperating with Lerach.
>In any case, if the claims turn out to be true, the Olympian reputations
>of Intel founder Andy Grove and Dell founder Dell could be due for some
>unflattering makeovers--like those endured by sluggers Mark McGwire and
>Barry Bonds after the BALCO steroid inquiry.
>
>Lerach's suit alleges, among other things, that from at least 2003 to
>2006 Dell received massive, undisclosed, end-of-quarter rebate payments
>from Intel in exchange for Dell's agreement not to ship any computers
>using microprocessors made by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The payments
>were allegedly never less than $100 million per quarter and, in at least
>one year, totaled about $1 billion. (During this period Dell represented
>about 20% of the worldwide market for the x86 processors both Intel and
>AMD made.) Intel forbade Dell from disclosing the payments, the
>complaint says, so as not to draw scrutiny from antitrust regulators.
>The payments were allegedly known to only about 15 top Dell officers,
>and were negotiated with personal involvement by Grove, Michael Dell,
>and Rollins. Since 1999, according to the complaint, Dell Computer would
>secretly design AMD-powered computers every year, but it would never
>ship them "due to the large sums of money the Company would lose from
>Intel for breaching the exclusive Dell/Intel processor relationship."
>These payments were allegedly in addition to, and nearly an order of
>magnitude larger than, the "market development funds" that Intel was
>known to be paying Dell and other customers under co-branding programs
>like "Intel Inside." Lerach's suit, which is brought on behalf of
>several institutional Dell shareholders, alleges only securities law
>violations, not antitrust claims, and names Intel and
>PriceWaterhouseCoopers (Dell's accountants) as co-defendants.
>
>A Dell spokesperson declined comment on the suit. In a telephone
>interview, Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy was extremely dismissive of it.
>"Our preliminary review suggests that much of it is largely made up," he
>says. "We plan to move very quickly to defend ourselves." He also
>stresses that neither the SEC nor Justice Department investigators have
>ever approached Intel in connection with their on-going probe of
>accounting issues at Dell, which started, according to Dell's
>disclosures, in August 2005. That SEC probe is thought to focus on
>possible earnings manipulation relating to the way Dell accounted for
>warranty revenue and expenses.
>
>Still, Lerach's allegations have a ring of plausibility about them, in
>that nearly everyone in the industry has wondered why it took Dell until
>late 2006 to begin offering AMD-powered computers, when AMD's
>microprocessors were widely seen as having attained technological
>superiority over Intel's by early 2003. The complaint's accusations also
>raise eyebrows because they dovetail so explosively with allegations AMD
>made in a mammoth antitrust suit it filed against Intel in Delaware
>federal court in June 2005. (See "Intel's Worst Nightmare," here, about
>that case.) (About 80 antitrust class actions have subsequently been
>filed against Intel on behalf of consumers seeking treble damages from
>Intel for allegedly having paid inflated computer prices.)
>
>The centerpiece of AMD's suit was the claim that Intel was paying
>so-called loyalty rebates to numerous major computer makers in exchange
>for varying degrees of exclusivity--80%, 90%, and, in some cases, 100%.
>In March 2005 the Japan Fair Trade Commission had found that Intel was,
>indeed, paying such rebates to five major Japanese computer makers
>(presumably Sony, Toshiba, NEC, Hitachi, and Fujitsu, though the
>companies are unnamed in the public version of the JFTC order) and that
>the rebates violated Japanese competition law. (Intel settled the JFTC
>matter shortly thereafter without admitting wrongdoing.) In its suit AMD
>alleges that Intel has been paying manufacturers so-called first-dollar
>rebates, meaning that at the end of the quarter, if the customer has
>achieved the level of exclusivity Intel seeks, it will get a retroactive
>discount on every Intel processor it purchased that quarter; if, on the
>other hand, it falls short, it gets nothing. Unlike conventional volume
>discounts--from which consumers can only benefit--many competition
>authorities believe loyalty rebates can become illegally coercive and
>exclusionary when offered by a dominant industry supplier. (Intel
>supplies about 80% of the worldwide market for x86 processors.)
>
>Intel has so far insisted--notwithstanding the JFTC ruling--that it does
>not use such rebates. "We don't buy exclusivity," Intel general counsel
>Bruce Sewell told Fortune last fall, staking out the position his
>company still stands by. "We offer a discount program," he said then,
>"which is stepped at basically 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%. So if you buy below
>20%, you get no discount. If you buy 20% to 40%, you get a discount, but
>it applies only to the units between 20% to 40%. . . . You don't have
>this dramatic incentive, where you get nothing below 90%, and everything
>above 90%. In our view, this is a very traditional discount that scales
>with volume."
>
>CORRECTION: Earlier version incorrectly referred to Bobby Bonds, when I
>meant his son, Barry. Thanks to "Bob in St. Louis" for noticing.
>===
>
> /m

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