A beautiful legal gem unearthed by FPG on ihub, with a very similar MO. Intel will have a very hard time squirming out of this one.
Posted by: fastpathguru
In reply to: None
Date:7/12/2005 9:33:02 PM
Post #of 59251
Been googling a little on antitrust and found a similar case:
LePage's Inc. v. 3M
mofo.com
On March 25, 2003, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued its opinion in LePage's Inc. v. 3M, 324 F.3d 141 (3d Cir. 2003). Rehearing the case en banc, the court in a 7-to-3 decision reversed the panel decision over a sharp dissent and upheld a $68 million jury verdict that 3M had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by maintaining a volume-based "bundled rebate" program and offering cash incentives to customers that effectively foreclosed LePage's from competing with 3M in the sale of transparent tape.
...
The decision in LePage's, in our view, resulted from a confluence of several facts (as found by the majority), including: (1) LePage's was the only significant competitor of 3M; (2) 3M adopted its bundled rebate program after LePage's entered the market; (3) the intent of the 3M program was to eliminate demand for private label tape and competition from private label tape manufacturers; (4) 3M not only bundled rebates across six "diverse" product lines, it set minimum targets for each product line, and the number of targets met determined the size of the rebate the buyer would earn on all of its purchases, thus creating "a substantial incentive for each customer to meet the targets across all product lines to maximize its rebates"; (5) the level of rebates was so high that the single-product competitor could not, as a practical matter, offer similar price concessions to some customers (i.e., they were "as much as half of LePage's entire prior tape sales to the customer"), and the rebate programs were "customized" to exclude LePage's products; (6) 3M offered some customers incremental rebates for exclusivity; (7) 3M offered no evidence to support its efficiency justifications for the bundled rebate program; and (8) 3M "conceded" that it could recoup any forgone profits from this program once the private label manufacturers were out of business.
fpg |
