European justice on Wednesday canceled a fine of 1.06 billion euros imposed in 2009 by Brussels on the American manufacturer of electronic chips Intel, for abuse of dominant position linked to disputed rebates.
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The EU court held that "
the analysis carried out by the (European) Commission is incomplete and, in any event, does not allow it to be established to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable or likely to have anti-competitive effects
”.
70% market share
The fine of 1.06 billion euros, a record amount at the time, was announced on May 13, 2009 to the manufacturer of microprocessors, accused of having abused its dominant position between 2002 and 2007, by implementing a strategy intended to exclude its only serious competitor, AMD, from the market.
The abuse of Intel, which then held at least 70% of the market share of certain processors in the EU, consisted in particular of rebates granted to computer manufacturers to buy from it alone almost all of their chips.
The cancellation of the fine comes after almost 13 years of legal proceedings.
It is still subject to appeal before the Court of Justice of the European Union.
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This fine represents the fourth largest amount imposed for anti-competitive practices by the Commission.
It has since been exceeded in three cases involving the American technology giant Google.
The largest, in the amount of 4.34 billion euros, was inflicted in 2018 on the search engine specialist for having tried to impose its own applications on manufacturers of tablets and smartphones by taking advantage of the dominant position of its Android operating system.
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