The European Commission has fined nine chipmakers a total of €331m (£284m) for their role in operating a price-fixing cartel in the DRAM market.

The cartel manipulated the market for six years, according to the Commission, pushing up prices of DRAM in PCs and servers across Europe.

“The overall cartel was in operation between 1998 and 2002,” the Commission said in its ruling. “It involved a network of contacts and the sharing of secret information, mostly on a bilateral basis, through which they coordinated the price levels and quotations for DRAM sold to major PC or server manufacturers.”

The EU antitrust watchdog levied a €145m fine against Samsung, while Infineon and Hynix were hit with €56m and €51m fines respectively.

Six other companies - NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Elpida and Nanya - were also handed fines of a smaller magnitude.

The EC said another company involved in the case, Micron, “was not fined because it revealed the existence of the cartel to the Commission”.

It is not the first time Europe has bared its teeth at chip makers. Last year, the EC fined Intel almost $1.5bn for “keeping competitors out of the market”.

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