Samsung confessed to fixing the memory market price penalty of $300 million

Washington, October 14th () - South Korea's Samsung Electronics has admitted to manipulating computer memory prices and agreeing to pay a fine of $300 million, U.S. Department of justice officials said on Thursday.

This is the second largest in the history of the United States for the crime of monopoly fines, prior to this, the U.S. Department of justice has the world's largest number of DRAM computer chip manufacturers conducted a survey of 3 years.

Thomas Barnett, head of the U.S. Department of justice antitrust Barnett (Thomas), said the 7 employees of Samsung Corp is not in this judgment, which means they may face antitrust prosecution one by one.

"We're going to make a decision about that," Barnett said. He added that in the case of price manipulation in the prosecution of individuals, rather than just for the company, to prevent similar crimes have an important deterrent effect.

The Justice Department has forced the other two companies to plead guilty and received a fine of more than $345 million.

The Minister of justice Alberto Gonzalez (Alberto Gonzales) said: "the price manipulation poses a serious threat to the free market, it stifles innovation, seize the consumers from the price competition in the interests of."

Samsung said in a statement, the company strongly supports fair competition and ethical behavior, to prohibit the spirit of fair competition behavior." Chris Chris Gutihart, the company's spokesman, declined to name the names of the 7 employees referred to by Mr Barnett and whether they were still working in the company.

Samsung received a subpoena from the grand jury in 2002, and at the end of last year set aside $100 million for a possible ruling.

The fate of Samsung's main rival, which is suspected of conspiring to manipulate the price of several other memory chip makers, is that Hyundai's South Korean firm earlier this year admitted price rigging and paid a fine of $185 million. In September last year, the German Infineon Corporation agreed to pay $160 million fine. Samsung, another competitor, is located in Micron, Idaho, because of cooperation with inspectors, is expected to be exempt from prosecution.

According to information provided by the Ministry of justice, Samsung and other manufacturers of chips to determine the price of the victims include DELL, HP, Compaq, IBM and Apple computers and other companies.