EU Regulator Raids Intel Offices

stevedcc writes "BBC news is reporting that Intel's offices in Munich, Germany have been raided by European Union competition regulators. From the article: 'The Reuters news agency reported that the Commission also raided computer retailers on Tuesday including Germany's Media Markt, which sells PCs with Intel central processing units but not those made by AMD. Regulators have the power to fine Intel up to 10% of annual turnover if they find it guilty of stifling competition. Intel has said it is "confident" it had acted lawfully.'"

What about Saturn?

[Xelios]

Saturn is another big electronics retailer in Germany, will they be raided too? Because like Media Markt they don't sell AMD either. Not surprising considering they're both owned by the Metro conglomerate [wikipedia.org]. Must make for some good 'competition' in the electronics market...

Printers?

[JCSoRocks]

It's interesting that this is a big deal in the chip industry but not with printers... Everyone knows printers get sold for nothing and all the money is made on the ink and paper. You don't here about raids for selling printers below cost. I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of profit comes from CPU's versus graphics chips, chipsets, controllers and the myriad of other products that AMD and Intel make. If CPUs don't represent a significant portion of the income for either business - what difference does it make? In that case they're both obviously playing the printer game where their CPU is priced cheap so that you'll buy their chipset, graphics, etc chips too.

Re:Printers?

[dasbush]

Everyone knows printers get sold for nothing and all the money is made on the ink and paper. You don't here about raids for selling printers below cost

Since it is generally accepted by all printer manufacturers that there is no money in printer, but rather in the ink, all the companies are doing it. In fact, since there are more than two companies doing this practice and surviving (even thriving) then it clearly is not a monopoly. If there were only two printer companies in the world, and the much larger one started selling ink for nothing, then the analogy would be comparable.

That said, you raise an interesting point about where Intel/AMD make their money. Is it in the CPU or the Mobo's/Video Cards/etc that are optimized to work with the CPU?

Re:Gone Too Far

[matria]

This happens in other markets as well. Some years ago my husband worked for Pfizer. Pfizer and most of the other big pharmaceuticals made penicillin. It wasn't exactly a large profit item, but a good seller. Then a European company started "dumping" and nobody else was willing to match their prices. So all the other pharmas quit making penicillin; most of them re-tooled their penicillin facilities to other products. Pfizer also quit making penicillin, but their equipment was so old they just left it sit. The European company misjudged and ended up going out of business. Suddenly there was no supply of penicillin. So for a couple of years, until some other companies got their penicillin facilities retooled back to making penicillin, Pfizer had the only world supply of penicillin,and could pretty much charge whatever they wanted.

So this sort of behavior is definitely not a good thing. Except for Pfizer there for a while, anyway.