Dell Accused of Hiding Intel Payments

Anusha

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Jun 13, 2006
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The same Wednesday the company announced that founder Michael S. Dell would return to the CEO role, a lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Austin claiming that Dell concealed problems in accounting and product quality from shareholders while company executives reaped $3.3 billion from selling their stock. Chuck Mulloy, named as a defendant, said Intel had done nothing wrong and vowed to fight the lawsuit: "It's pricing. It's discounting. It's a normal business practice. Our business practices are both fair and lawful."

The case was filed by the class-action firm of lawsuit firm of Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman & Robbins LLP on behalf of two institutional investors. Mary Blasy, one of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit, said in an interview that the plaintiffs don't claim that the payments were illegal but that Dell cheated investors by concealing payments that the company didn't control. The lawsuit charges that Dell got the Intel payments "for shipping only Intel-based products and not doing business with AMD."

News source: Physorg
 

chaminga_d

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Oct 26, 2006
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Intel has reasons to do this.

Dell is the number 1 PC maker in the world, and if they use both Intel AND AMD cpus, then the comparison between them is unavoidable. Then reports like "AMD is a better choice for the money, price/performance-wise" could potentially be hurting Intel, and another price war happens within Dell, and inevitably, Intel loses market shares.

No wonder Intel is accelerating its plan for advanced graphics segment, now that AMD has merged with ATI.

But if the article is true, Intel is showing an extreme form of anti-competitive behavior and it's not neccesarily a good thing for consumers.