The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) yesterday said it would investigate whether Samsung Electronics Co had violated the Fair Trade Act (公平交易法) amid allegations that the South Korean company had hired people to criticize HTC Corp’s (宏達電) products online.
The commission said it had formally set up an investigation against Samsung after being tipped off by Internet users last week.
Netizens sent the commission a report accusing Samsung of false advertising, saying the firm had paid bloggers to write defamatory statements about HTC’s products.
“We will check and see whether the online articles mentioned in the report can be categorized as advertisements, and whether the information in the articles is misleading,” commission spokesman Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said by telephone.
Samsung would be subject to a fine of between NT$50,000 (US$1672.8) and NT$25 million if the commission deemed the move to be false advertising, Sun said.
In addition, HTC can file a lawsuit against the writers of the articles if they contain defamatory remarks, he said.
Local media reported that between April 1 and April 4, Samsung hired writers to open several online accounts as part of a marketing campaign to promote its new flagship Galaxy S4 phone in Taiwan. But some netizens found user of these accounts also attacked products from its rivals.
On April 5, Samsung responded in a statement that several of its employees had misunderstood the basic principles of the company, and that it had decided to stop the practice of posting articles online or responding to any discussion about its products.
HTC yesterday said it was disappointed with its competitor’s behavior and that it was considering legal action against Samsung.
“HTC has always been dedicated to product innovation and design. We may take necessary action to defend ourselves and consumers’ rights,” the company said in a statement.
Additional reporting by Helen Ku
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to