Qualcomm and Samsung have strengthened their relationship, which could help the mobile chipmaker fend off its antitrust case in South Korea. As part of an expanded cross-license agreement, Samsung "will be withdrawing its interventions" into Qualcomm's appeal against an $868 million fine announced in 2016 over what the Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) deemed "excessive" licensing fees.
Qualcomm released a statement on January 24 confirming it will appeal a massive fine imposed by the European Commission for alleged market dominance abuse. Earlier that day, the European Commission said in a statement it had decided to fine Qualcomm €997 million ($1.2 billion) for payments it made to Apple in order to secure its leading market position for LTE baseband chipsets.
Ericsson announced an internal shake-up on Wednesday with the launch of a new unit, Business Area Emerging Business, which will consolidate other units within the company. The new business unit will focus on innovation and new business development, with a focus on IoT and 5G. It will be led by former McKinsey & Company partner Asa Tamsons.
With mobile data traffic surging by eight times and 1 billion 5G subscriptions expected by the end of 2023, mobile operators must meet consumer and enterprise demand for applications such as 4K/8K video streaming, virtual reality/augmented reality, and immersive media, suggests telecom equipment vendor Ericsson.
Private equity firm One Equity Partners has partnered with Ericsson on its Media Solutions business and One Equity Partners will become the majority shareholder. Ericsson will retain 49% of the shares in the company. Ericsson remains the owner of Red Bee Media and will continue to develop it as an independent and focused media services business. The terms of the transaction are confidential.
Vodafone and Huawei have conducted a successful field trial of Fixed Access Network Slicing. The virtual access network solution partitions a physical fibre to the home (FTTH) network into multiple virtual network slices, creating multi-tenancy virtualization of the access network.
Huawei has signed a cooperation agreement with UnionPay International with the aim of working together to promote the globalization of Huawei Pay and accelerate its roll-out worldwide to provide a "better mobile payment experience" for Huawei mobile device users.
Qualcomm issued a letter to investors ahead of its annual stockholder meeting in March, highlighting the "significant" regulatory issues with Broadcom's acquisition proposal. This follows a previous letter issued by Qualcomm last week in which the company demonstrated why Broadcom's "hostile takeover" would "dramatically undervalue" Qualcomm.
German telecom giant Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Huawei, together with Intel, announced they have collaborated to achieve the world's first 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT) based on the 3GPP R15 Standard with a commercial base station.
Qualcomm announced that the European Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) have authorized the acquisition of NXP Semiconductors. The acquisition has now received 8 of the 9 approvals around the world, with China remaining.
