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Hardware Intel's Korean Offices Raided by the KFTC
Brandon Hill (Blog) - February 9, 2006 9:12 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 45 comment(s) - last by Viditor.. on Feb 12 at 12:47 PM

The early morning raid occured at Intel's offices in the Daehan Investements & Trust Building - Courtesy Heerim A&P
The Korean Fair Trade Commission conducts dawn raids on Intel offices in Korea

In another twist to AMD's ongoing antitrust case against Intel, the KFTC (Korean Fair Trade Commission) completed a dawn raid on Intel's Korean offices. This latest raid was conducted to investigate Intel's relationship with four South Korean PC vendors. AMD claims that Intel's predatory business dealings have victimized 38 companies around the world.

Intel was found guilty of monopolistic business practices by a Japanese court ruling in March of 2005. In July of 2005, Intel offices and the offices of major European PC vendors were raided by the European Commission to gather information in the ongoing antitrust case. The company then lost another court battle on December 15th, 2005 after the Tokoyo District Court ruled that documents implicating Intel in improper business practices had to be turned over to the Japanese Fair Trade Commission and AMD.

AMD's executive vice president, Thomas M. McCoy, wasted no time expressing his thoughts on this latest inquiry into Intel's business practices: "Similar dawn raids conducted by competition authorities in Japan revealed evidence of illegal business practices that violated that country's Antimonopoly Act. The JFTC ruled that Intel conditioned deals with Japanese PC OEMs based on excluding competition. Last year, the European Commission also conducted dawn raids across Europe to gather evidence of Intel monopoly abuse within the European Union. How many raids in how many countries need to happen before Intel accepts responsibility for its anticompetitive actions and ceases its unlawful business practices?"

For those of you have haven't read AMD's full briefing on its case against Intel, be sure to download it here. It's quite a whopper weighing in at at a 48 pages.

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AMD user on Intel's side
By tjr508 on 2/10/2006 2:49:45 AM , Rating: 2
I think that AMD is the dirty one here.

Those of us watching the market know that
a. AMD processors have gone up in price recently
b. The supply of AMD OEM processors available for retail has completly dried up.

This means one of two things:

AMD is price fixing, making them worse than Intel in many ways. They are also taking a crap on their consumer base by forcing us to pay extra for un-used HSFs and packaging.

or

AMD simply cannot keep up with demand. In this case it would be absolutely retarded for any major OEM to even consider using AMD processors in their machines. This is the major public reason Apple officials gave for choosing Intel. If Dell or Apple have 20,000 orders, they are expected to ship 20,000 machines that day and not wait who knows how long for more processors. Being AMD has two major FABs now and Intel has four or more, Intel can spend most of its time pushing out product while AMD must re-tool one fab while hoping the other one stays running at satisfactory levels. AMD is simply not an attractive choice for big OEMs, so as long as big OEMs are responsible for the bulk of PC sales, Intel will remain king of the fair market.





RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Bonrock on 2/10/2006 4:39:51 AM , Rating: 2
You know, I wondered for a while why Apple chose Intel instead of AMD. Then, when it was revealed that Intel had devoted hundreds of engineers to the task of helping Apple convert the MacOS to x86, I knew why Apple chose them. Intel gave Apple free engineering labor to convert their OS; I highly doubt AMD has hundreds of engineers to spare on something like that.


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Griswold on 2/10/2006 5:53:49 AM , Rating: 2
Oh clueless one.


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Viditor on 2/10/2006 7:05:09 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Those of us watching the market know that...


sigh...I think you were looking at the wrong market :)

1. HP has already stated that they under-ordered which was the reason for the shortage
2. AMD did indeed sell ALL of their inventory last quarter, as well as already being sold out for this quarter. But by next quarter they will have almost triple the production ability (Fab36 ships for revenue at the end of this quarter on 300mm, as does Chartered Semiconductor on 300mm)

In the US, every single 1st and 2nd tier OEM (with the exception of Dell) now carries AMD...and 2 (Sun and eMachines) have even dropped Intel.


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Questar on 2/10/2006 9:41:32 AM , Rating: 2
And the two (?) that dropped Intel are in the toilet financialy.


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Viditor on 2/10/2006 9:49:24 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
And the two (?) that dropped Intel are in the toilet financialy

And are now improving since they made that decision...


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Questar on 2/10/2006 11:01:12 AM , Rating: 2
Improving?!?

Sun (which I don't recall using Intel)
2nd quarter 2006 - net loss $223 million
2nd quarter 2005 - net profit $4 million

eMachines
Income last quarter 2005 - $22 million
Income last quarter 2004 - $94 million


So what exactly is your defination of improvment?


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By amish on 2/10/2006 2:40:16 PM , Rating: 2
can you get us a link on the Sun loss? i just find it hard to believe since Q2 is usually april, may, and june; and currently it's february...


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Questar on 2/10/2006 3:38:41 PM , Rating: 2
You are confusing caledar quarters with fiscal quarters.

Here's their earnings report:

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-01/sunf...


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Viditor on 2/11/2006 12:16:21 AM , Rating: 2
Unfortunately, Questar has got his numbers quite wrong...

Sun has increased their net revenues by 17.5% over the last year
Dec 05 net revenues = $3.337 B
Dec 04 net revenues = $2.841 B

Sun dropped the Intel Xeon based V60 and V65 in 2004 in favour of the Opteron

As to eMachines, they just dropped Intel this quarter...but analysts were favourable on the news. eMachines is part of Gateway (which has also just recently started to sell AMD).


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By tjr508 on 2/11/2006 1:38:20 PM , Rating: 2
The revenue increased because they baught other companies. Who cares if they have a revenues in the billions if 223 million more dollars left the company than came in.


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By Viditor on 2/12/2006 12:47:22 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Who cares if they have a revenues in the billions if 223 million more dollars left the company than came in

I suppose if you were an investor for just one quarter, that would be important...
But the R&D bump makes up for twice that (going from $600M to over $1B last quarter). Sun has become a very healthy looking company with excellent prospects for growth going forward.
When you measure a company, short-term profit/loss is not a very good indicator of it's success...


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By MrKaz on 2/10/2006 10:27:56 AM , Rating: 2
That’s a little strange.

I have been recently in a super datacenter infrastructure (recently build) (best in Europe) and the servers where all SUN....

My country government has replaced their servers with new SUN (servers) machines.....

I didn’t know they where in bad shape because they sell....


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By kilkennycat on 2/10/2006 10:49:50 AM , Rating: 2
"I think that AMD is the dirty one here.

Those of us watching the market know that
a. AMD processors have gone up in price recently
b. The supply of AMD OEM processors available for retail has completly dried up. "

a. Wrong. Only the price of the 939-pin 1xx dual-core Opterons have been raised slightly to ensure that they did not compete with A64 processors for "enthusiast-built" desktop sockets. The original pricing seems to have been a marketing mistake. The prices of the A64 units, especially X2 have fallen by an average of about 8% in the past month.


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By kilkennycat on 2/10/2006 10:52:44 AM , Rating: 2
... sorry posted incomplete by mistake... continuing...

b. The AMD "OEM-tray" processors have been withdrawn from the RETAIL market to combat counterfeiting/re-marking, especially in the Far East.


RE: AMD user on Intel's side
By modestninja on 2/12/2006 3:15:13 AM , Rating: 2
Another little comment I want to make on this one is that it takes more than one company to price fix. Companies are allowed (in most cases unless they have a regulated monopoly) to charge whatever they want for their products and services.

Price fixing is when two or more companies get together and decide to raise their prices in order that they all make more money. It's what gas stations have been getting away with for years. I believe in order to convict a company of this there has to be evidence that the companies communicated with each other about fixing the price (although if I remember correctly there was not too long ago a company fined for price fixing without finding a smoking gun.)


Not really a "raid"
By Questar on 2/9/2006 9:32:02 PM , Rating: 2
The term raid is from AMD's press release - they used it seven times in fact.

Both the Korean Government and Intel have stated that it was nothing more than a request for more information.

Inforworld has a great article on the AMD lawsuit in this weeks issue discussing the spin AMD is putting on the case. Specifically how AMD is trying to sway public opinion by convincing that AMD is doing it for them. Infoworld points out that AMD is doing only for themselves.




RE: Not really a "raid"
By JackPack on 2/9/2006 9:43:15 PM , Rating: 2
Considering AMD's corporate culture, I'm not surprised they would use words that try to connote criminal activity on Intel's part.

"Raid" is the kind of term you would use during the Prohibition Era.

"You're not gonna take me alive, G-Man!"


RE: Not really a "raid"
By oTAL (blog) on 2/9/2006 11:28:23 PM , Rating: 2
Corporate spin... I still think there's truth in it though. Little doubts about intel's monopolistic actions...


RE: Not really a "raid"
By Griswold on 2/10/2006 5:50:26 AM , Rating: 2
Oh yea inforworld... laff. You know what? Last summer, the authorities in europe called it raids - in public too. So, stop being a FUD machine for intel, please.


RE: Not really a "raid"
By Viditor on 2/10/2006 6:51:38 AM