According to a new report, Samsung may have been asked by Apple to pressure regulators in South Korea to ramp up their investigation into Qualcomm. The ultimate goal was apparently to get the chipmaker to reduce royalty payments, this according to documents filed by Qualcomm in court.
Bloomberg reports that a senior Apple executive, possibly CEO Tim Cook, had a word with a senior counterpart at an industry conference in Idaho two years ago. The Samsung executive was likely Lee Jae-yong, the recently incarcerated vice chairman of the conglomerate.
No Love Lost
There is no love lost between the two companies. Samsung and Apple have been involved in their own patent disputes for years. However, they also have a working relationship which sees Samsung supplying billions of dollars in parts to Apple. It's also Apple's ally in another patent dispute with Qualcomm.
Qualcomm's court filing alleged that the Apple executive urged his Samsung counterpart to put pressure on antitrust regulators in Soth Korea to intensify an interrogation into Qualcomm that they had been conducting since 2014. “Get aggressive,” the Apple executive apparently said.
Qualcomm was ultimately hit with a $912.34 million fine in December 2016 by the Korea Fair Trade Commission and was also directed to improve how it handles patent licensing and chip sales. The company appealed the ruling but it was shot down by the Seoul High Court.
The allegation in Qualcomm's filings that Apple got Samsung to use its influence with the government in South Korea to pressure regulators to go after Qualcomm is troubling. This was before Samsung found itself involved in an unrelated anticorruption probe that led to the ouster of former president Park Geun-hye and the incarceration of Lee Jae-yong.
“I don’t know what conversation they are talking about,” said Apple's general counsel Bruce Sewell, adding that “For Apple to have said to Samsung, ‘You guys are in Korea and you should be watching this case carefully,’ doesn’t seem to me to be anything beyond simply the kind of conversation two CEOs might have.”
Samsung declined to comment. The KFTC said that the agency started its Qualcomm investigation on its own and that Samsung was “only one of the companies we enlisted for reference.”
