JAPANESE FIRM AGREES
TO PAY $84 MILLION FINE

By Julia Cheever, Bay City News Service

January 30, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - The U.S. Justice Department announced today that a Japanese computer chip company has agreed to plead guilty in federal court in San Francisco and pay an $84 million fine in an international price-fixing case.

Elpida Memory Inc. is the fourth company to plead guilty in federal court in San Francisco in the past two years to charges of conspiring with other companies to fix the prices of memory chips known as dynamic random access memory, or DRAM.

The other companies were Samsung Electronics of South Korea, which agreed last year to pay a $300 million fine; Hynix Semiconductor Inc. of South Korea, which agreed last year to pay a $185 million fine; and Infineon Technologies of Munich, Germany, which agreed in 2004 to pay a fine of $160 million.

Thomas Barnett, acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department's antitrust divisions, said, "We are gratified to bring to justice another member of the DRAM cartel."

Barnet said DRAM is the most commonly used semiconductor memory product. The chips are used in many electronic devices including computers, printers, servers, hard disk drives, televisions, mobile phones and digital cameras.

The plea agreement must be approved by a federal trial judge.

The settlement would resolve two criminal counts filed against Elpida by the Justice Department in U.S. District Court in San Francisco today.

The two-count information filed by federal prosecutors accuses Elpida of one count of conspiring with other manufacturers to fix DRAM prices between 1999 and 2002 and one count of conspiring in 2002 to rig a bid for the purchases of memory modules manufactured by Sun Microsystems Inc.

The criminal charges allege that U.S. computer companies victimized by the price fixing included Dell Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. Apple Computer Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.

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