SKorea clears chipmakers of cartel charges
South Korea's anti-trust watchdog said Monday it has found no evidence that leading chipmakers in South Korea and other countries colluded to fix prices.
The Fair Trade Commission said it closed a probe into allegations of a cartel operated by 10 makers of static random access memory (SRAM) chips in South Korea, Japan and the United States.
SRAM chips are used to store data in servers, switches and low-power devices such as mobile phones.
The two South Korean firms were Samsung Electronics, the world's largest microchip maker, and Hynix Semiconductor.
The probe was launched in October 2006 to find out whether SRAM makers were involved in an international price-fixing scheme.
"We have found no evidence of a conspiracy," Fair Trade Commission regulator Shin Bong-Sam told reporters.
(c) 2009 AFP
