South Korea's anti-trust watchdog has launched a probe into Samsung SDI as part of an international investigation into alleged price-fixing, South Korean officials said yesterday.
The Fair Trade Commission is investigating allegations that Samsung SDI colluded with foreign rivals to fix the price of cathode ray tubes (CRTs) for televisions.
"It is part of an international probe into alleged price-fixing this week. We are cooperating with the Fair Trade Commission," a Samsung SDI spokesman said.
The commission refused to comment.
Samsung SDI, which is a sister firm of industry giant Samsung Electronics Co, is one of the world's largest makers of plasma display panels.
It has rapidly shifted its business focus to flat-panel screens and away from traditional CRT systems.
In Japan on Thursday, a CRT subsidiary of the electronics giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co was raided by anti-trust regulators.
Japan's Fair Trade Commission conducted an on-site inspection of MT Picture Display Co, a 100 percent subsidiary of Matsushita, said Akira Kadota, a spokesman for Matsushita, the Osaka-based maker of Panasonic-brand products.
Kadota said he could not comment why the subsidiary was searched, citing ongoing investigations.Fair Trade Commission officials were not immediately available for comment.
MT Picture Display is suspected of fixing prices for CRTs with other manufacturers in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, Japanese business daily Nikkei reported yesterday.
The European Commission also confirmed on Thursday that its officials had carried out a number of unannounced inspections at CRT manufacturers over suspected cartel activity.
Authorities in the US were also involved in the investigation, Nikkei reported.
The CRT manufacturers are suspected of operating an international cartel since 2005 or earlier, it said.
Demand for the tubes -- used in traditional box TVs -- is shrinking amid increasing sales of flat TVs.
But global sales of CRTs remain strong because of demand in developing countries and are estimated at ?500 billion (US$4.43 billion), according to estimates in the Japanese media.
According to Japanese industry estimates, some 60 percent of global demand for color television sets was for CRT models in the year to March 2008.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained