China announced yesterday it would fine 12 Japanese auto parts suppliers a total of US$202 million for colluding to raise prices in an unfolding anti-monopoly probe of the country’s auto industry.
Beijing has launched a series of investigations into automakers and technology suppliers under its six-year-old anti-monopoly law, in an apparent effort to force down prices. Officials said earlier that Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Chrysler also violated the law.
The Japanese suppliers were found to have colluded improperly, some for up to 10 years, to raise prices of ball bearings and other parts, according to China’s National Development and Reform Commission.
Photo: AFP
“This harmed the legitimate rights and interests of consumers,” the commission said on its Web site.
PRICE COMPLAINTS
Regulators have given few details of the probe but industry analysts say they might have been motivated by complaints about the high price of imported luxury vehicles and replacement parts.
Two of the Japanese companies, ball bearing makers NSK Ltd and NTN Corp, announced on Tuesday they were among those being fined.
The others were components suppliers Hitachi Ltd, Denso Corp, Aisan Industry Co, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, Mitsuba Corp, Yazaki Corp and Furukawa Corp and bearings makers Nachi-Fujikoshi Corp and JTEKT Corp.
The commission said that the components makers were fined a total of 832 million yuan (US$136 million) and the bearings suppliers 403 million yuan, but it gave no breakdown by company.
COMPETITION LAW
The EU Chamber of Commerce in China, in a statement last week, said competition law should not be used to achieve other goals such as forcing price reductions.
The group said that it received reports regulators pressure companies to accept penalties without a full hearing and avoid involving their governments.
A Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesman denied this week that foreign companies were treated unfairly.
On Monday, the government said Mercedes Benz was guilty of “vertical price-fixing.” It said the unit of Germany’s Daimler AG used its control over supplies of replacement parts to charge excessive prices.
Officials have said Volkswagen AG’s Audi luxury unit and Fiat Chrysler Automobile NV’s Chrysler would also face unspecified punishment for violating the law. Toyota Motor Co has said its Lexus unit is under scrutiny.
TECH FIRMS PROBED
Regulators also have announced investigations of Qualcomm Inc and Microsoft Corp.
Last year, Chinese regulators fined five foreign dairies and one from Hong Kong a total of US$108 million on charges they violated the anti-monopoly law by setting minimum prices for their distributors.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS