Cost of doing business.
I’d really like to know what their margins are, because if my math is right that $0.5m fine is roughly 3% of $17.1m. The very least a fine should do is siphon off all profits, more to account for those you do not catch and to be an effective deterrent. But even if you do want to incentivize companies to cooperate taking all profit should be the lower limit. And I have a really hard time imagining that margins in the chip market are that thin.
Agreed, all fines should be on profit and not revenue. Revenue is a terrible metric to enact fines.
That I am actually not sure about, since you can manipulate profit numbers much easier (see Hollywood accounting) compared to revenue. But making money is ultimately of course the goal for profit companies, so naturally where you can hurt them.
If you decide to not go for a draconian fine where the margin of error are wider (doesn’t matter too much if you fine 4 or 5 times profit, you still get the point across), then you need to at least try to put in some effort to be accurate.
And 3% margin on a deal would be something you’d see from discount retailers like Aldi or Walmart.
Funny thing was I was just recently reading an article about how GlobalFoundries is leveraging it’s US-based manufacturing to develop a niche for US military/government contracts (where you don’t need or even want bleeding edge nodes).
