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Japan’s Sharp Corp has agreed to pay Dell and two other companies $198.5 million for an out of court settlement over a lawsuit dealing with fixed LCD panel prices in North America and Europe. It was initially filed in November of 2009 against Sharp and several other companies including Epson, Hitachi and Toshiba. A spokesperson for Sharp said that the company came decide upon the settlement agreement independently from the other companies that are also involved.

Just last week, we mentioned that Toshiba was fined $87 million for LDC price fixing, denying the charges with plans to fight the ruling. Sharp, on the other hand, released a company statement saying: “After broadly considering factors such as the U.S. civil lawsuit system and the facts of this case, Sharp has determined that agreeing to a settlement is the best policy.”

Sharp said that the company is still figuring out how exactly the settlement will affect earnings, with plans to report a special loss in the end of the 2013 fourth quarter. Display panels on laptops and mobile phones are some of the most expensive components and price-fixing in the LCD panel industry is not all that uncommon.

[via Verge]

Sharp agrees to pay $198.5M to settle LCD price-fixing lawsuit is written by Elise Moreau & originally posted on SlashGear.
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A jury in San Francisco ruled that the Japanese electronics conglomerate that is Toshiba conspired with vendors to keep LCD prices “artificially high”. The jury found out that Toshiba and its subsidiaries conspired with other manufacturers of Thin Film Transistor-Liquid Crystal Displays to raise and fix the prices of TFT-LCD panels. Toshiba decided to fight the allegations in federal court while other defendants in the class-action lawsuit settled the case outside the court. In December last year, seven LCD manufacturers, including Sharp, Samsung, and Hitachi, agreed to pay may more than $553 million overall to settle the allegations that they all conspired to control the pricing of LCD panels.

The jury determined earlier today that Toshiba is liable to return $70 million to consumers who bought its products, and pay $17 million to manufacturers who used its LCD panels – amounting to $87 million overall. But that could be tripled since the federal antitrust law requires the trebling of these damages. “There was strong evidence that Toshiba participated in the price-fixing conspiracy through communications with other TFT-LCD manufacturers. The jury rejected Toshiba’s claim that it had done nothing wrong, and this is one of the few antitrust class actions ever tried to a successful verdict,” said Bruce Simon, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Display companies fined for price fixing, Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi merge LCD operations,

The Qosmio F750 glasses-free 3D laptop is now called the F755. August 16th is the date when you’ll be able to pick up Toshiba’s latest 15.6-inch media machine starting at $1,699. The notebook packs in a Core i7 processor, 6GB of RAM, and a 750GB hard disk.

Other features include a Blu-ray drive, and GeForce GT 540M GPU. It won’t be able to convert 2D games to 3D out of the box, but Toshiba is working with Nvidia to deliver that feature by November, if you can wait that long. It starts shipping in about two weeks.

[Engadget]