CCI closes case against Intel; finds no evidence of unfair biz practices

The Competition Commission on Friday closed a four year-old case against Intel Corporation after concluding that there was no abuse of dominant position by the chip maker.

"The Commission is of the opinion that no case of contravention of the provisions of Section 4 of the Act by the OP is made out in the present matter," as per the order.

Section 4 of the Competition Act pertains to abuse of dominant position. Opposite party (OP) refers to Intel.

The complaint was filed by Velankani Electronics Pvt Ltd, which is engaged in designing and manufacturing electronic products in India, including servers.

The server has various sub-assemblies such as processor, server-board, chassis, memory disk, among others.

It sought to manufacture its own server-board and for making a workable server, the server-board needed to interface with the processor manufactured by Intel.

For manufacturing such a compatible server board, it required access to the reference design files and simulation files of server-boards from Intel.

However, as per Velankani, Intel refused to provide such files.

An investigation was carried out in the matter by the investigation arm of CCI, the Director General (DG), which concluded that there was no denial of access to any file by Intel.

The set of files provided by Intel were sufficient for the informant to develop its server-boards, as per the opinion of the informant's own experts.

The DG noted that the firm was given access to the important resources prepared by Intel for designing a server-board.

The regulator said that "the Commission is of the opinion that there was no deliberate denial of any requisite file (reference design file or simulation file) by the OP to the Informant."

Resultantly, as Intel is not found to have denied access to the informant to any requisite reference design files and/or simulation files, no abuse of dominant position can be attributed to it, the order said.