Hynix makes provisions for US investigation
The South Korean company – which revealed the amount in the footnotes of its audited 2004 results – said that the provision was partly to blame for fourthquarter net income under performing analysts' estimates.
European chip maker Infineon Technologies and number one memory maker Samsung have also set aside reserves in relation to the US investigation.
In December last year, four executives of Infineon were sentenced to six months in jail and fined US$250,000 after pleading guilty to price fixing charges in the USA. The four men admitted at the US District Court in San Francisco to involvement in a conspiracy in 2001 and 2002 to fix the price of DRAM chips.
The convictions came just months after Infineon was found guilty in September 2004 of conspiring to fix prices as part of a wide-ranging investigation by the US Department of Justice into the memory chip market.
The company at that time agreed to pay a US$160 million fine over five years. Semiconductor research firm Gartner has estimated that the US investigation could cost the industry as much as $2.2 billion in fines.
