NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – European Union antitrust regulators have launched an in-depth review of Qualcomm’s planned $47 billion acquisition of NXP Semiconductors, the largest supplier of NFC controllers and secure elements globally.
The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, said Friday it is concerned that, among other things, Qualcomm and NXP would hold a strong market position in smartphone processors as well as NFC controllers and secure elements and would have the “ability and incentive” to try to exclude rivals from these markets through practices such as bundling its processors and NFC chips together.
In addition, the merged companies could hurt competition and raise prices by modifying NXP's intellectual property licensing practices, in particular NXP’s IP licensing of its NFC technology, by bundling the acquired NFC intellectual property to Qualcomm's patent portfolio. “The Commission will investigate whether such conduct could lead to anticompetitive effects, such as increased royalties for customers and exclusion of competitors,” the commission said in the Friday statement.
