Enterprise

EU fines ASUS and three other companies for online price fixing

Companies face EUR 111 million in fines

Published

July 25, 2018

Luigi Leonardo

Over the past months, the European Commission has kept itself busy with a company hit list that keeps growing every week. Recently, the commission handed out the biggest fine in history to Google for breaking anti-trust laws. Now, four more companies have received fines for anti-competition.

Based on a press release from the commission itself, the four companies include ASUS, Denon & Marantz, Philips, and Pioneer. Throughout the past decade, all four companies prevented online retailers from setting their own prices to the former’s products.

The release states that the companies required retailers to sign a contract. If online retailers didn’t follow prescribed prices, the companies would pull out their stocks.

Usually, an online retailer sets its own prices to fuel competition between other retailers. Sometimes, they can hold season-long discounts promos to boost sales numbers. The contract disallowed them from changing the affected companies’ prices in any way.

Further, these companies have checked on their retailers’ prices using instantaneous monitoring software. This enabled them to execute swift actions when a retailer voids a contract.

Fortunately, these practices (as far as these four companies are concerned) have stopped as of the past few years. However, the period from which these practices occurred are still finable from EU’s standards. According to the commissions, these periods, spanning from 2011 to 2015, are enough to incur substantial fines for all four companies.

In total, these fines amount to more than EUR 111 million. Of these, ASUS grabbed a huge share — EUR 63.5 million. To their credit, all four also got a 40 to 50 percent reduction for participating in the EU’s investigation.

Currently, more companies are also under investigation. For example, Nike, Sanrio, and Valve might suffer the same fate soon.

Despite the guilty verdict, these fines don’t compare to the millions in profit that these companies have earned. More than anything, the EU’s decision serves as a warning against violators in the future.

Related Topics:ASUS Denon Philips Pioneer

Enterprise

ACMobility Launches ChargeFleet: Seamless solution for businesses

B2B solution for corporate fleets and transport groups

Published

February 18, 2026

GadgetMatch

Ayala Group’s ACMobility has launched ChargeFleet, a new B2B digital solution for corporate fleets and transport groups.

The new service introduces a shareable digital wallet that streamlines charging expenses, reduces manual tracking, and improves cost control.

As more organizations explore electrifying their mobility operations, many continue to face operational challenges — including fragmented payment systems, reimbursement delays, and limited visibility over charging usage.

ChargeFleet addresses these gaps by introducing a centralized, shareable digital wallet. Here, fleet managers can allocate and monitor charging credits across multiple drivers across a single platform.

The system is a seamless process designed for long-term usage and easy deployment across any organization.

Once integrated, ACMobility assigns charging credits to the client’s fleet manager. The manager then can distribute these to multiple drivers. Meanwhile, the latter will be able to see and use their assigned credits via the Evro app.

ChargeFleet is available as a prepaid product through the ChargeFleet Store. Users can buy offers via GCash or credit card. No application process is required.

Looking ahead, ACMobility will continue to enhance the ChargeFleet experience with exclusive value-added perks integrated through Evro and Power on Wheels.

The upcoming features highlight ACMobility’s ongoing push to provide a future-proof support system for the evolving needs of their customers’ businesses.

Enterprise

Sony teams up with 13 companies for sustainable global supply chain

Sustainability through introduction of renewable plastics

Published

February 9, 2026

GadgetMatch

Sony, along with several companies, have established the world’s first global supply chain for the production of renewable plastics that can be used in Sony’s high-performance audiovisual products.

The supply chain consists of 14 companies across five countries and regions. The various plastic materials manufacture through this supply are slated for use in Sony’s products that will launch worldwide.

High-performance products such as audiovisual equipment involve a wide variety of plastics. The result is a complex supply chain that makes it difficult to visualize and manage the entire flow.

Additionally, plastic components that require high performance in terms of flame resistance and optical properties cannot be fully replaced with plastics from material recycling.

To address these challenges, these 14 companies have collaborated to visualize the existing supply chain for Sony’s products:

Sony Corporation
Mitsubishi Corporation
ADEKA CORPORATION
CHIMEI Corporation
ENEOS Corporation
Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corporation
Hanwha Impact Corporation
Idemitsu Kosan Co., Ltd.
Mitsui Chemicals, Inc.
Neste Corporation
Qingdao Haier New Material Development Co.
Ltd., SK Geo Centric Co., Ltd.
Toray Industries, Inc.
Toray Advanced Materials Korea Inc.

Sustainability through renewable plastics

The new supply chain created will enable the production of multiple types of renewable plastics from biomass resources with a mass balance approach.

This allows Sony to proactively source raw materials for its products with quality, as well as properties equivalent to virgin fossil-based plastics.

Defining the supply chain also helps the companies track and document GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions data in a verifiable way.

This allows participating companies to leverage the data to advance efforts to reduce their carbon footprint going forward.

Sony’s initiative with a wide range of global partners is part of the “Creating NEW from reNEWable materials” jointly launched by the electronics giant and Mitsubishi.

It aims to achieve zero usage of virgin fossil-based plastics through the introduction of renewable plastics.

Enterprise

realme is reportedly going back to being an OPPO sub-brand

All scheduled phones will still launch on time, though.

Published

January 9, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

A popular story among Chinese smartphone brands is whenever a sub-brand spinning off into its own independent entity. A less common one is when an independent entity suddenly merges back into the main entity. And yet, that’s the story we have today. realme is reportedly going back to being a sub-brand of OPPO.

If you don’t remember realme’s time as a sub-brand, then it’s hardly your fault. It’s been a long while since realme was considered a sub-brand. In 2018, the brand spun off on its own to form one of the most popular names in the Chinese smartphone space.

Today, via Leiphone, realme will return to OPPO as a sub-brand. Current realme CEO Sky Li will still retain his responsibilities heading the brand. Plus, all products on the current release schedule will still come out as planned.

However, starting this year, realme will start reintegrating back into OPPO, particularly through the latter’s after-sales programs. OnePlus will also follow the same structure going forward.

Currently, realme has not officially announced the move. That said, we also don’t know how the brand will address the reported change. It’s possible that the shift is just internal and has no effect on how the brand faces the public. For now, only time will tell.