Clamping down on cartels and collusive practices

MENTION cartels, and certain industries - oil, diamonds, steel - tend to come up as prime examples of where price fixing and anti-competitive collusion have historically been rife. More recently, electronics firms seem to have joined the list.

In 2010, the European Commission (EC) fined six producers of liquid crystal display (LCD) panels (two South Korean and four Taiwanese companies) a total of 649 million euros (S$1 billion) for operating a cartel between October 2001 and February 2006. Convening mainly in hotels in Taiwan for what they called "crystal meetings", the companies agreed on prices - including price ranges and minimum prices - and exchanged information on future production planning, capacity utilisation, pricing and other commercial conditions over the period.

Two years later in 2012, the EC handed down its biggest antitrust penalty yet when it fined six firms a total of 1.47 billion euros for market manipulation in what was then already an outdated technology - cathode ray tubes for TV and desktop computers - for almost a decade. Between 1996 and 2006, the companies - including big names Philips, LG Electronics and Panasonic - met in Europe and Asia for their collusive "green meetings", so called because they often ended in a round of golf.