Four major Silicon Valley companies have formally agreed to pay US$324.5 million to settle claims brought by employees who accused them of limiting competition by colluding not to poach each other’s talent.
The settlement, between Apple Inc, Google Inc, Intel Corp, Adobe Systems Inc and about 64,000 workers, was disclosed in papers filed late on Thursday with a US federal court in San Jose, California.
US District Judge Lucy Koh has been asked to preliminarily approve the accord at a hearing on June 19, over an objection by one of the four named plaintiffs, Michael Devine, who says the settlement let the companies off too easily.
The payout was originally reported by Reuters, but not officially confirmed.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs may seek up to 25 percent of the settlement amount in legal fees.
Filed in 2011, the lawsuit accused Silicon Valley companies of conspiring to limit competition and keep wages down for engineers, programmers and other technical staff.
The case has been closely watched because of the potential US$9 billion of damages sought, and its occasional embarrassing revelations into how Silicon Valley operates.
Among the communications that became public were pointed e-mails written by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs that at times admonished then-Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to stop “raiding” his company.
Thursday’s settlement gives workers only a few thousand US dollars each on average.
The combined proft of the companies in their latest fiscal years was about US$60 billion, with three-fifths generated by Apple.
In court papers, two law firms representing the plaintiffs said that Devine’s objection should not doom what they consider a fair and reasonable settlement for an antitrust case, and which they say serves the best interests of the class.
They pointed to a July 2012 jury verdict in the same court that found that Toshiba Corp conspired to fix prices in the liquid-crystal display market, but awarded just US$87 million of damages, one-tenth of what was sought.
“The amount of the settlement does not relate to the size or profitability of the companies we sued,” Joseph Saveri, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an interview.
“It relates to the claims we made, the law that applies to them, and the facts that we could prove at trial. Based on that, I think the settlement is a significant achievement,” Saveri added.
Meanwhile, Koh on Friday last week approved separate settlements totaling US$20 million over alleged poaching by Walt Disney Co’s Lucasfilm and Pixar units, and by Intuit Inc.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS