SAN FRANCISCO (Bloomberg) Hitachi Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. agreed to pay $27.8 million to settle claims they conspired to fix prices for memory chips, filings in federal court in San Francisco showed Thursday.
Hitachi, a maker of home appliances and railroad equipment, will pay $11.5 million; Toshiba, Japan's biggest memory chip maker, agreed to pay $9.2 million; and Mitsubishi Electric will pay $7.1 million to resolve lawsuits by direct purchasers of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM chips, according to filings by lawyers for the buyers. They claim the manufacturers overcharged customers from 1999 to 2002.