Samsung's Goldilocks Flash Pricing Gets It In Trouble

from the regulation-via-fairy-tale dept

Thu, Oct 13th 2005 10:55am — Carlo Longino

These prices are too high: Samsung will pay a $300 million fine after pleading guilty to price fixing in the US, following government allegations it and two competitors (which have already pled guilty) conspired to fix the price of their chips between 1999 and 2002, citing a number of companies as victims, including Apple. These prices are too low: the plea and fine come a week after Korean authorities said they were looking in to investigating Samsung for setting prices of memory it sold to Apple too low. Apple reportedly secured some 40 percent of Samsung's quarterly flash memory output for the launch of the iPod nano, and there are allegations that the volume discount it got put prices at below-market rates. Times are a bit rough for Samsung, as its electronics business is expected to post another losing quarter Friday, while the Samsung Group, South Korea's largest conglomerate, deals with a number of scandals at home. What will it take for Samsung to get prices just right?

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4 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 13 Oct 2005 @ 1:02pm

No Subject Given
it will probably take a large group of hot blondes who go around screwing authority figures who r trying to get samsung in trouble.
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John Jorsett, 13 Oct 2005 @ 1:42pm

Strange
I find Samsung having revenue difficulties surprising. I've noticed that their products are what I've been buying lately. In the past couple of years I've bought two televisions and a computer monitor, whereas in years past I would probably have been buying Sony products. Samsung's pricing and feature set are great.
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Sohrab, 13 Oct 2005 @ 4:39pm

No Subject Given
A few samsung products including 2 tv's? Im sorry. Dont worry, I give you another year before you see why you should have kept to Sony and not sumsung. Sumsungs tv qualityes go down the tube after some usage.
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wetiowvut2b7565v7823tr89r67tr23q89v57348975qwfj, 14 Oct 2005 @ 12:34am

This article is a little confusing...
The 300$ million fine is for DRAM, which is differnt to the flash RAM they sold to apple
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