HP Inc on Friday was awarded US$439 million in damages against Quanta Storage Inc (廣明光電) and its US subsidiary, Quanta Storage America Inc, after a US federal judge tripled a jury’s award for damages that were caused by a widespread scheme to inflate the price of optical disk drives.
Quanta Storage is a Taoyuan-based subsidiary of contract laptop maker Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦).
In October last year, a Houston jury ordered Quanta Storage to pay HP US$176 million in damages.
Texas Southern District Judge David Hittner on Friday said that Quanta Storage had not shown any reason that the jury’s findings should be set aside.
He tripled the damages award, as authorized under antitrust law, to US$528 million before deducting US$89 million in settlements paid by the other companies HP accused of participating in the price-fixing scheme.
Other disk-drive makers such as Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc, Sony Optiarc Inc and Panasonic Corp settled with HP over the past decade. Only Quanta Storage chose to go to trial.
Andrew Lusby, an attorney for Quanta Storage, said that the company was not commenting at this time on the tripled damages.
The Taiwanese company had argued that tripling the damages would violate constitutional prohibitions on excessive punitive damages.
However, the judge said that antitrust law allows for tripling awards as compensatory rather than punitive damages.
“HP hopes this judgement sends a powerful message to suppliers all over the world that there are significant consequences when you violate US antitrust laws,” HP lawyer Alex Roberts said in an e-mail after Hittner’s ruling.
In a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday, Quanta Storage said it was still assessing the impact on its operations.
The company reiterated that it has a different business model from those of the other defendants, as it only assembles disk drives on a contract basis for Sony Optiarc, which sold the completed products directly to HP.
Quanta Storage said it regretted the judge’s decision and would appeal the ruling to protect the interests of the company and its shareholders.
Additional reporting by staff writer
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian laborer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms about 15m below. Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years. However, a vicious heat wave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiraling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry. “This year is a crisis,”
HIGH-TECH: As leading-edge process technologies become more complicated, only a handful of players are able to provide design services, the company’s CEO said Artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯) yesterday said that revenue would grow significantly again in 2026 after adding a major AI chip customer, reversing moderation amid a product transition next year. The Taipei-based application-specific IC (ASIC) designer reiterated its strong revenue growth forecast for this year and 2026 after its stock plummeted about 23 percent to NT$3,145 from a peak of NT$4,085 on March 6 amid growing competition. Alchip said it has built strong partnerships with cloud service providers (CSP), denying that it had lost orders to smaller competitors such as Faraday Technology Corp (智原). Faraday said it has secured