Tag Archives: price fixing

A 2002 EU price-rigging fine against Nintendo has been dropped by nearly £30 million on appeal.

EU judges said the parent company should benefit from the same discount on its penalty as that already granted to John Menzies, Nintendo’s UK distributors.

The ruling reduces the original fine of £134 million to £107 million.

More on Channel 4.

According to this Edge report, Sharp’s been fined 261.07 million yen ($3 million) for suspected price-fixing of the LCD displays used in DS Lite.

The Japan Fair Trade Commission accused Sharp of violating the country’s Antimonopoly Act by colluding with Hitachi to control the price of the screens.

The fine’s due by March 19.

More detail through there.

The European Commission’s launching an investigation into why various items cost more in the UK for no apparent reason, according to this. PlayStation 3′s pricing is one of the first things mentioned in the article.

“Sony’s British launch price for the 60GB version of the PlayStation 3 console last year was £425, some 27 per cent more than in the U.S. and 68 per cent more than Japan,” said Sean Poulter, writing in the Mail. “The price was also higher than the £399 charged in France and Germany and the £397 in Australia. The prices across all these nations have since come down.”

“Where there is no obvious explanation for why the price of a standard item, say, a camera, is vastly different across borders, we will want to know why,” said a Commission spokesperson. “We are screening the markets, taking into account levels of complaints about prices, pricing patterns across Europe and customer satisfaction. We are looking for the kind of retail patterns which raise questions.”

“No obvious explanation”. Just remember that the next time anyone gaming-related trots out the old favourite of “tax” as the reason British consumers have to pay more for games items than anyone else in the world.