A former electronics executive from Taiwan was charged on Tuesday with taking part in a global price-fixing conspiracy involving cathode ray tubes (CRTs), the US Justice Department said.
A federal grand jury in San Francisco indicted former Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (中華映管) chairman and chief executive Lin Cheng-yuan (林鎮源) for allegedly fixing prices of CRTs used in computer monitors and televisions, the department said.
Lin, also known as CY Lin, was the first person charged in connection with an antitrust division investigation into the CRT industry.
He is already under indictment in connection with a price-fixing case involving Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) panels.
Lin, another former executive at Chunghwa and an executive of South Korea’s LG Display Co Ltd were indicted a week ago for allegedly taking part in a global conspiracy to fix prices of LCD panels.
In the latest indictment, the Justice Department accused Lin of “conspiring with others to suppress and eliminate competition by fixing prices, reducing output and allocating market shares” of color display tubes (CDTs) and color picture tubes (CPTs) between 1997 and 2003.
CDTs and CPTs are both types of CRTs. CDTs are used in computer monitors while CPTs are used in color TVs.
“This conspiracy harmed countless Americans who purchased computers and televisions using cathode ray tubes sold at fixed prices,” said Scott Hammond, acting assistant attorney general in the antitrust division.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS