Lawyers for a Rambus Inc., which is suing Micron Technology Inc. and other chipmakers, said the email by a former Micron executive supports the lawsuit.
In a jury trial in San Francisco, Rambus Inc. lawyers presented the 2001 email exchange between Linda Turner, then Micron’s vice president of international sales, and members of her staff. The email cited then-declining prices of a certain category of standardized memory made by Micron and other chipmakers called double data-rate, or DDR.
In response to a comment that the declining prices were “scary,” Turner wrote, “No problem! We want DDR to explode into the marketplace so have actually been requesting Infineon, Samsung and Hynix to lower their DDR pricing to help it become a standard (and drive Rambus away completely).”
Rambus says Hynix and Micron colluded to drive its chips out of the market. Rambus contends it would have earned $3.95 billion in royalties without the conspiracy. Under California law, a jury finding of damages in that amount would be automatically tripled to $11.9 billion. Micron and Hynix have denied the allegations.
Turner, in videotaped testimony played for the jury, said her message was “totally sarcastic.” At a time when the memory chip industry was in “dire straits,” Turner said, what she suggested in the message was “absolutely ludicrous.”
“Everybody was fighting for pennies, and to think they would go lower in their pricing was crazy,” Turner said.
But Michael Cohen, the chief executive officer of Fremont, Calif.-based MDC Financial Research, who is following the trial for investor-clients, said that in a trial in which jurors are being asked to piece together “several mosaics” of subplots, the Turner e-mail is “one piece of evidence where you have everything you need.”
The message shows Micron directing other chip manufacturers, by name, to lower their prices, and that the purpose of the coordination was to ruin Rambus, Cohen said. He said he found Turner’s explanation that the message was sarcastic to be “unbelievable.”
Hynix, in 2005, and some of its employees pleaded guilty to federal charges of fixing prices of some chips. A Hynix lawyer told the Rambus trial jury that Rambus’ chips weren’t among the products cited in admissions of wrongdoing in the criminal case.
Micron avoided prosecution in the price-fixing investigation by cooperating with the Justice Department. As a result, jurors in the Rambus case won’t be told about a Micron salesman’s 2004 guilty plea to obstructing the government’s investigation.
Micron spokesman Dan Francisco declined to comment.
