Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) won an antirust lawsuit against Rambus (NASDAQ:RMBS) on Wednesday as a jury rejected Rambus’ $4 billion claims against Micron Technology and Korea based Hynix Semiconductor.
At issue were Rambus’ allegations that Micron and Hynix conspired illegally to constrain availability of Rambus’ RDRAM and keep its prices unnaturally high while holding competitive DDR pricing low in an effort to eliminate Rambus’ RDRAM memory technology from the marketplace. After a long sought trial and eight weeks of deliberations, a San Francisco state court jury rejected claims by Rambus that Micron and Hynix colluded to fix memory chip prices and discourage the adoption of its technology.
If Rambus had won, it could have sought as much as $12 billion in damages under California’s treble damage policy, a major blow to the already struggling memory manufacturing industry.
As a result Micron technology shares were up almost 24% finishing the day at $6.74. Micron is the largest memory manufacturer based in North America and the 4th largest in the world after Korean giants Samsung and Hynix and Japan based Toshiba. Samsung had last year settled with Rambus for $900 million.
Rambus can of course file an appeal, as they have done in the past when they’ve lost cases, but the consensus is that Rambus is extremely unlikely to win such an appeal.
