Top Court Sides With Intel Over EU Antitrust Fine

A long running legal battle between chip giant Intel and the European Commission (EC), that stems back to 2009, could finally be over.

Europe’s top court, the Court of Justice, announced on Thursday that it “ upholds the annulment by the General Court of the Commission’s decision finding an abuse of a dominant position on the part of Intel and imposing a fine of €1.06 billion on Intel.”

The case stems back to 2009, when the EC had slapped Intel with a €1.06 billion (£883m or $1.14 bn) antitrust fine, after officials accused Intel of abusing its market position by trying to block rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) by giving rebates to Dell, Hewlett-Packard Co, NEC and Lenovo to buy Intel chips.

Protracted case

Intel fought against this fine in a long running legal battle.

For example in March 2020 Intel told a European court that the 2009 European Commission antitrust decision was ‘fundamentally flawed.’

At the time Intel said that the EC either took a wrong approach in its decision, or it carried out an efficient competitor (AEC) test and got it wrong.

An AEC test is an economic analysis that determines if a dominant company forces out competitors that are as efficient or more efficient through anti-competitive practices.

And then in a surprise twist, the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe’s second-highest court agreed with Intel in January 2022, after it criticised the EU competition enforcer’s analysis, and it annulled the fine.

“The (European) Commission’s analysis is incomplete and does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable of having, or likely to have, anticompetitive effects,” the court had stated.

This was despite the same court in 2014 having upheld the Commission’s 2009 decision but was subsequently told in 2017 by the EU Court of Justice, Europe’s highest, to re-examine Intel’s appeal.

The Commission had appealed the other parts of the General Court’s ruling in 2022 related to conditional rebates offered by Intel at the EU Court of Justice, Europe’s top court.

Appeal rejected

Now the EU Court of Justice said it “rejects all of the grounds of appeal raised by the Commission”, thereby confirming the lower court’s decision to overturn a billion-euro antitrust penalty.

Intel was quoted by the Associated Press as saying in a statement that it’s “pleased with the judgment delivered by the Court of Justice of the European Union today and to finally put this part of the case behind us.”

This is not the end of the legal fight in this case, as Intel is currently fighting a separate fine of €376.36 million, imposed by the European Commission in September 2023.

The Commission at the time stated that it had decided to re-imposed a fine of €376.36 million on Intel for a previously established abuse of dominant position in the market for x86 central processing units.

At the time of writing there has been no public response by the European Commission, or the outgoing competition boss Margrethe Vestager to the court ruling.