Legal Row Over LCD Panels

An unusual legal dispute has arisen over the sale price of LCD panels in The States over the course of a decade or so. Tech Data – a computer hardware distributor – isseeking legal help in regard to a bizarre claim that giants such as LG, Samsung, Sanyo and Sharp all conspired to “fix, raise, stabilise and maintain prices” in regard to the sale LCD screens between 1996 and 2006.
The company claim that representatives of the aforementioned organizations met and agreed on a fixed price to sell the LCD panels in America in a bid to effectively eliminate the competition from the market. Indeed, Tech Data have gone further to suggest that the conspiracy did not just rest with the manufacturers themselves but also extended to include affiliates of the companies and also corporate subsidiaries; labelling the offenders as a ‘cartel’. Tech Data are claiming that these actions had the effect of thwarted any price drop in times of oversupply or change in technology so that the companies involved were keeping their profits high when others were suffering as a result.
Tech Data have claimed that they suffered as a direct consequence of this supposed conspiracy and are now seeking legal action in order to recover some of the proceeds lost because of this suspected unlawful action. In fact, this is not the first time that ‘price fixing’ has been an issue; in 2009, Nokia filed a similar lawsuit against several companies including Sharp and Samsung over the alleged price and sale of LCD panels.