lcd panel 1.1 billion settlement in stock

Consumers who bought a TV, monitor or laptop computer with an LCD flat-panel screen from a retailer between 1999 and 2006 paid inflated prices and can apply for cash reimbursement until Dec. 6, officials announced Tuesday.

The announcement comes as a result of a settlement in a lawsuit that claims nine leading electronics manufacturers - Samsung, LG Display, Hitachi, Sharp, Toshiba, AU Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, HannStar Display Corp. and Chi Mei Optoelectronics - reaped "billions of dollars in illegal profits" by price fixing.

The lawsuit alleged the manufacturers conspired to limit production of, and illegally raise prices for, LCD flat-screen TVs, monitors and laptops, according to Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen"s office. The screens were sold to purchasers, who ultimately passed on the overcharges to consumers. The companies also monitored retail prices in the United States "to ensure that the cartel had set profit-maximizing prices" for the LCD panels, according to the lawsuit involving Wisconsin.

Under the settlements, eligible consumers and businesses across the country will be able to collect $25, $100, $200 or more by answering a few simple questions about the number of LCD items they bought. The exact payment depends how many products were purchased and how many claims are filed.

"This class action against international price fixers allows individual class members to recover a significant portion of what was illegally taken from them and acts as a warning to others that those who fix prices illegally will not gain from their wrongdoing," Van Hollen said in a statement Tuesday. "Although we are sometimes bombarded with these class action notices, the amount available for consumers who purchased LCD TVs, laptops and monitors is significant and I encourage eligible purchasers to file claims."

Dana Brueck, a spokeswoman for the attorney general"s office, said the state also reached an out-of-court settlement with Epson, so consumers who purchased Epson products may also be eligible for a payment through the same process.

Sharp, Hitachi and Samsung agreed to fix prices and limit the supply of LCD panels starting some time before 1999. As production increased in South Korea and Taiwan, the conspiracy expanded to the other manufacturers.

"The participating defendants typically discussed how to raise prices and reached agreements on target prices, floor prices, and/or price ranges for . . . LCD panel sales," the lawsuit alleges. "They also discussed their pricing regarding specific customers and reached agreements as to how to deal with customers" requests for discounts. The participating defendants also typically reached agreements to limit the production of . . . LCD panels by setting target production levels, delaying capacity expansion, slowing assembly line volume . . . and other mechanisms."

The settlement releases all claims of indirect purchasers including consumers, businesses and state government in Wisconsin. Companies that purchased LCD panels directly from the manufacturers are still pursuing in lawsuits in California.

No receipts or other documents are required for small claims. To get more information about the settlements or to file a claim online, visit www.LCDclass.com or call the LCD settlement notice administrator at (855) 225-1886.

Consumers who may have moved since the historic $1.1 billion nationwide LCD settlement was announced in October 2012 should notify the settlement administrators about their new address to see if their check can be re-sent. (Contact info in the bullet points below.)

The checks sent to consumers last fall were $43.49 per consumer for every computer or laptop claimed and $86.98 for each LCD TV. For consumers who claimed several items, that adds up to a couple hundred dollars. The deadline to file a claim was Dec. 6, 2012.

Wisconsin consumers, businesses and public entities received a total of more than $27 million from the settlement. In addition, the state of Wisconsin received $1.5 million in penalties.

The settlement was the result of a lawsuit by 24 states alleging that nine leading electronics manufacturers -- Samsung, LG Display, Hitachi, Sharp, Toshiba, Au Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, HannStar Display Corp. and Chi Mei Optoelectronics -- reaped "billions of dollars in illegal profits" by price fixing.

The lawsuit alleged that the manufacturers conspired to limit production of, and illegally raise prices for, LCD flat-screen TVs, monitors and laptops. The screens were sold by retailers between 1999 and 2006. For more details on the allegations, see this Public Investigator story.

(Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co, Sharp Corp and five other makers of liquid crystal displays agreed to pay more than $553 million to settle consumer and state regulatory claims that they conspired to fix prices for LCD panels in televisions, notebook computers and monitors.A worker prepares a display of Sharp flat panel televisions for the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7, 2009. REUTERS/Steve Marcus

The settlement is the latest arising from lawsuits alleging the creation of an international cartel designed to illegally inflate prices and stifle competition in LCD panels between 1999 and 2006, affecting billions of dollars of U.S. commerce.

In December 2006, authorities in Japan, Korea, the European Union and the United States revealed a probe into alleged anti-competitive activity among LCD panel manufacturers. Many companies and executives have since pleaded guilty to criminal antitrust violations and paid more than $890 million in fines.

The latest payout includes $538.6 million to resolve claims by “indirect” purchasers that bought televisions and computers with thin film transistor LCDs, as well as claims by eight states: Arkansas, California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, New York, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The accord calls for Samsung to pay $240 million, Sharp $115.5 million and Taiwan-based Chimei Innolux Corp $110.3 million, settlement papers filed on Friday with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco show.

Other defendants have yet to settle, including Taiwan-based AU Optronics Corp, one of the largest LCD panel manufacturers; South Korea’s LG Display Co and Toshiba Corp.

The accord follows a settlement this month by eight companies, including Samsung and Sharp, to pay $388 million to settle litigation by direct purchasers of the LCD panels.

A jury in a Minnesota bankruptcy court has found the U.S. arm of Bank of Montreal BMO-T liable for US$564-million in damages in a lawsuit related to one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history, and the bank will take a $1.1-billion charge as it prepares to appeal the decision.

It awarded US$484-million in compensatory damages as well as nearly US$80-million in punitive damages in favour of the trustee in bankruptcy proceedings for companies controlled by Thomas Joseph Petters, who was convicted in 2008 of leading a nearly $2-billion fraud and was a client of a bank later acquired by BMO.

The trustee is trying to recover money for victims of the fraud. The compensatory damages were about one quarter of the US$1.9-billion that the trustee had sought.

BMO said in a written statement that it is disappointed with the ruling, “which is not supported by the evidence or the law,” and the bank “intends to pursue all available legal options including appealing the jury verdict and award.” The bank also said that according to the terms of a prior settlement in another Petters-related case, “BMO Harris is entitled to recover approximately 21 per cent of any amount that it pays to the trustee.”

The lawsuit began in 2012 and alleged that Milwaukee-based Marshall and Ilsley Bank, which BMO acquired in 2011, and a predecessor bank facilitated a Ponzi scheme run by Mr. Petters between 1999 and 2008. Mr. Petters was revealed to have been running a US$1.9-billion fraud over a 15-year span – at the time, the largest Ponzi scheme in history, but later surpassed by a fraud led by Bernie Madoff. Mr. Petters was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in federal prison.

Michael Collyard, a lawyer at Robins Kaplan LLP acting for the trustee, said it will also seek prejudgment interest that could bring the total award to more than US$1-billion if its arguments are successful. Mr. Collyard intends to seek 10-per-cent annual interest, which he says is allowed by Minnesota law.

As a result, BMO will record a provision of $1.12-billion that includes possible prejudgment interest as well as potential recoveries, which will result in an after-tax charge of $830-million to be recorded when the bank releases its fiscal fourth-quarter financial results this month.

TIC data do not explicitly identify CLO securities. Our previous FEDS note utilized a string matching methodology to identify U.S. CLO securities in the TIC data among all Cayman Island issued securities. In this note, we instead identify CLO securities in the TIC data using security identifiers from Moodys" Global CLO Data, resulting in $329 billion. We also supplement these results with about $11 billion of securities in TIC that were identified as CLOs by the original string matching and that either were classified as asset-backed securities in the TIC data or were verified by hand from the TIC categories of bonds and preferred equity. These string-matched securities may not have a match in Moody"s data due to the use of internal rather than standard security identifiers by some reporters in the TIC data or due to incompleteness of the Moody"s data. The $329 billion from the Moody"s match plus the additional $11 million from the original string match gives our total estimate of $340 billion.

We display riskiness of holdings using tranche types because those are available from one source for the largest share of U.S. holdings of CLOs. However, ratings are more easily tied to price indices such as the J.P. Morgan CLO index (CLOIE). Using ratings first by Moodys, and then by S&P and Fitch where Moody ratings are not available, the tranches of U.S. holdings of Cayman-issued U.S. CLOs correspond to ratings as shown in Table 5. Ratings across the three rating schemes are reconciled and grouped into standardized ratings categories. Equity tranches generally do not have ratings available. We have ratings for about $300 billion of the $302 billion of CLOs for which we have tranche data and that are not equity tranches. Table 6 shows ratings by investor type for senior, mezzanine, and junior tranche types.

3. For this estimate, we identified CLO securities with the help of Moody"s Analytics Global CLO Data, resulting in a smaller estimate of CLOs held by U.S. investors, $340 billion, relative to our 2019 FEDS note "Who Owns U.S. CLO Securities?". That note estimated that U.S. investors hold 90% of U.S. CLO securities, or $409 billion, utilizing a string matching methodology to identify U.S. CLO securities in the TIC data. See the appendix for an update to the earlier note"s Table 3 and a detailed discussion of the change in methodology. Return to text

6. For the tranche analysis, we only use the $329 billion of the $340 billion that comes from a direct match between TIC and Moody"s data. Return to text

Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977,Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of US$250,000 (equivalent to $1,117,930 in 2021) to Jobs and Wozniak during the incorporation of Apple.

In 2003, Apple"s iTunes Store was introduced. The service offered music downloads for 99¢ a song and integration with the iPod. The iTunes Store quickly became the market leader in online music services, with over five billion downloads by June 19, 2008.

In July 2008, Apple launched the App Store to sell third-party applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.App Store could become a billion-dollar business for Apple.

On January 14, 2009, Jobs announced in an internal memo that he would be taking a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple until the end of June 2009 and would spend the time focusing on his health. In the email, Jobs stated that "the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well", and explained that the break would allow the company "to focus on delivering extraordinary products".recession with revenue of $8.16 billion and profit of $1.21 billion.

On August 20, 2012, Apple"s rising stock price increased the company"s market capitalization to a then-record $624 billion. This beat the non-inflation-adjusted record for market capitalization previously set by Microsoft in 1999.intellectual property lawsuit.

In May 2014, the company confirmed its intent to acquire Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine"s audio company Beats Electronics—producer of the "Beats by Dr. Dre" line of headphones and speaker products, and operator of the music streaming service Beats Music—for $3 billion, and to sell their products through Apple"s retail outlets and resellers. Iovine believed that Beats had always "belonged" with Apple, as the company modeled itself after Apple"s "unmatched ability to marry culture and technology." The acquisition was the largest purchase in Apple"s history.

Apple is more than just a company because its founding has some of the qualities of myth ... Apple is two guys in a garage undertaking the mission of bringing computing power, once reserved for big corporations, to ordinary individuals with ordinary budgets. The company"s growth from two guys to a billion-dollar corporation exemplifies the American Dream. Even as a large corporation, Apple plays David to IBM"s Goliath, and thus has the sympathetic role in that myth.

In its fiscal year ending in September 2011, Apple Inc. reported a total of $108 billion in annual revenues—a significant increase from its 2010 revenues of $65 billion—and nearly $82 billion in cash reserves.dividend beginning in fourth quarter of 2012, per approval by their board of directors.

The company"s worldwide annual revenue in 2013 totaled $170 billion.Fortune 500 list of companies for the first time, rising 11 places above its 2012 ranking to take the sixth position.

In 2015, Reuters reported that Apple had earnings abroad of $54.4 billion which were untaxed by the IRS of the United States. Under U.S. tax law governed by the IRC, corporations don"t pay income tax on overseas profits unless the profits are repatriated into the United States and as such Apple argues that to benefit its shareholders it will leave it overseas until a repatriation holiday or comprehensive tax reform takes place in the United States.

On August 30, 2016, after a two-year investigation, the EU Competition Commissioner concluded Apple received "illegal state aid" from Ireland. The EU ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion), plus interest, in unpaid Irish taxes for 2004–2014.Revenue Commissioners tax ruling regarding its double Irish tax structure, Apple Sales International (ASI).Austria, Christian Kern, put this decision into perspective by stating that "every Viennese cafe, every sausage stand pays more tax in Austria than a multinational corporation".

On July 15, 2020, the EU General Court annuls the European Commission"s decision in Apple State aid case: Apple will not have to repay €13 billion to Ireland.

In July 2022, Apple reported an 11% decline in Q3 profits compared to 2021. Its revenue in the same period rose 2% year-on-year to $83 billion, though this figure was also lower than in 2021, where the increase was at 36%. The general downturn is reportedly caused by the slowing global economy and supply chain disruptions in China.

In December 2021, The Information reported that CEO Tim Cook had negotiated, in 2016, a five-year agreement with the Chinese government, motivated in part to allay regulatory issues that had harmed the company"s business in China. The agreement entailed promised investments totaling $275 billion.

During an event on March 21, 2016, Apple provided a status update on its environmental initiative to be 100% renewable in all of its worldwide operations. Lisa P. Jackson, Apple"s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives who reports directly to CEO, Tim Cook, announced that as of March 2016post-consumer recycled paper or sustainably managed forests, as the company continues its move to all paper packaging for all of its products.Conservation Fund, have preserved 36,000 acres of working forests in Maine and North Carolina. Another partnership announced is with the World Wildlife Fund to preserve up to 1,000,000 acres (4,000 km2) of forests in China. Featured was the company"s installation of a 40 MW solar power plant in the Sichuan province of China that was tailor-made to coexist with the indigenous yaks that eat hay produced on the land, by raising the panels to be several feet off of the ground so the yaks and their feed would be unharmed grazing beneath the array. This installation alone compensates for more than all of the energy used in Apple"s Stores and Offices in the whole of China, negating the company"s energy carbon footprint in the country. In Singapore, Apple has worked with the Singaporean government to cover the rooftops of 800 buildings in the city-state with solar panels allowing Apple"s Singapore operations to be run on 100% renewable energy. Liam was introduced to the world, an advanced robotic disassembler and sorter designed by Apple Engineers in California specifically for recycling outdated or broken iPhones. Reuses and recycles parts from traded in products.

Following further campaigns by Greenpeace,polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in its complete product line.cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) backlit LCD displays in its computers with mercury-free LED-backlit LCD displays and arsenic-free glass, starting with the upgraded MacBook Pro.CO2e, emissions, materials, and electrical usage concerning every product they currently produce or have sold in the past (and which they have enough data needed to produce the report), in their portfolio on their homepage. Allowing consumers to make informed purchasing decisions on the products they offer for sale.iPhone 3GS was free of PVC, arsenic, and BFRs.

In February 2016, Apple issued a US$1.5 billion green bond (climate bond), the first ever of its kind by a U.S. tech company. The green bond proceeds are dedicated to the financing of environmental projects.

In December 2017, two articles from The Verge and macOS High Sierra software were vulnerable to a bug that let anyone gain administrator privileges by entering "root" as the username in system prompts, leaving the password field empty and twice clicking "unlock", gaining full access.Twitter, rather than through proper bug bounty programs.The Verge"s Tom Warren to call it a "nightmare" for Apple"s software engineers and described it as a significant lapse in Apple"s ability to protect its more than 1 billion devices.ZDNet"s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote that "it"s hard to not come away from the last week with the feeling that Apple is slipping".

In May 2017, the company announced a $1 billion funding project for "advanced manufacturing" in the United States,Corning Inc., a manufacturer of toughened Gorilla Glass technology used in its iPhone devices.Jeff Williams, told CNBC that the "$1 billion" amount was "absolutely not" the final limit on its spending, elaborating that "We"re not thinking in terms of a fund limit... We"re thinking about, where are the opportunities across the U.S. to help nurture companies that are making the advanced technology— and the advanced manufacturing that goes with that— that quite frankly is essential to our innovation."

Also in 2010, workers in China planned to sue iPhone contractors over poisoning by a cleaner used to clean LCD screens. One worker claimed that he and his coworkers had not been informed of possible occupational illnesses.hexane, a neurotoxin that is a cheaper alternative than alcohol for cleaning the products.

On March 16, 2020, France fined Apple €1.1 billion for colluding with two wholesalers to stifle competition and keep prices high by handicapping independent resellers. The arrangement created aligned prices for Apple products such as iPads and personal computers for about half the French retail market. According to the French regulators, the abuses occurred between 2005 and 2017 but were first discovered after a complaint by an independent reseller, eBizcuss, in 2012.