Antitrust Litigation Attorney in San Francisco, California

What are capacitors?

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Capacitors are a product that everybody comes into dozens of times if not hundreds of times on a daily basis. Virtually every product that carries an electrical current or charge has a capacitor in it. If one thinks about modern life, one comes into dozens of products every day that contains an electrical current and each one of those contains one or more, perhaps dozens or hundreds, if you think about an automobile, of capacitors. So capacitors are all around us. The capacitors are – today capacitors are generally made by a relatively small number of large manufacturers located predominantly in Japan. The case – the capacitor’s case is a cartel case in which we bring claims on behalf of purchases of capacitors from these manufacturers.

We say that the manufacturers got together starting a number of years ago and formed a cartel and the cartel involved regular meetings of the manufacturers in which they got together and agreed on the prices they were gonna charge their customers and agreed not to compete with each other with respect to those customers. We alleged that those practices, those agreements have gone on for a number of years and have continued until recently. The cartel was global in scope. It affected all capacitors in the world. And as a consequence of that, the prices of capacitors were driven up all over the world, including in the United States. And again, as a consequence of that, prices of electrical goods or other products that contain capacitors were driven up.

And the other thing I would say about it is that the allegations of cartel behavior are supported by the fact that there are – that – let me start again. Our allegations are supported by the fact there is a pending criminal investigation by the United States Department of Justice into cartel activity, as well as other law enforcement activity by other competition authorities in Europe, in Asia and throughout the world.

California antitrust attorney Joseph Saveri defines capacitor.

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