Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission has now fined a local unit of South Korea’s Samsung for undermining the reputation of Taiwanese mobile phone maker HTC, according to Bloomberg. In a notice on its website, the consumer protection body has said that Samsung had organised an Internet campaign in violation of fair trade rules to praise its own smartphones while slamming the ones made by HTC.
This time around, the world’s smartphone leader reportedly hired college students to lead a defamation campaign against HTC. The FTC has now set the company’s fine at 10 million New Taiwan dollars ($340,000). It has also levied smaller fines on two Taiwanese trading companies which it said were responsible for mounting the Internet campaign. The exact fine for the latter companies has not been disclosed.
Samsung fined for slamming HTC products
This is not the first time the Taiwanese arm of the smartphone giant has gotten into trouble. Earlier this year, the FTC had fined Samsung NT$ 300,000 for misleading advertising about the camera functions on its Galaxy Y Duo. The company also had to face allegations of defaming HTC’s flagship smartphone, the One, in the past. At the time, reports had claimed that the South Korean company had paid students to write negative reviews about the device.
But the target of this campaign, HTC, has enough problems of its own. The latest FTC action in favour of HTC has come at a time where the Taiwanese company is suffering from internal conflict and disappointing sales for its smartphones. The company, which posted its first quarterly loss in the July-September period, has suffered a huge drop in its global handset market share. While the company had enjoyed 10.3 percent of the overall market share in the third quarter of 2011, the same quarter this year has seen the company’s market share shrinking to a mere 2.6 percent.
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