Muted reaction to EC raid on Intel

The major players in the European Commission's investigation into Intel business practices were saying little on Wednesday, as the implications of Tuesday’s dawn raids began to sink in.

Intel limited itself to reiterating that two offices — Munich and Swindon — had been the subject of investigation. In response to a rumour that as many as five Intel offices may have been raided by the EC, a spokesman said he "didn’t know" about that speculation.

In this atmosphere, others were behaving with similar circumspection. Dell also confined itself to repeating its announcements of the previous day, confirming that its European headquarters had been visited by EC officials.

But while Dell and Intel will be concerned with coming investigations, others could look forward to benefiting from the EU's action.

One company that could profit is Fujitsu Siemens. It was cited many times in the original complaint by AMD after it revealed that "Intel had pressured Fujitsu to remove Fujitsu’s AMD-powered desktop models from Fujitsu’s Web site" among other actions.

With impressive prescience, Fujitsu Siemens, just a few days ago, promoted its latest AMD-powered Emprino PCs to lead item on its web-site. The European PC company only has 3.7 per cent of the market for servers worldwide and 2.8 per cent of the market for PCs but commands higher shares in its key European markets.

But on Wednesday the company limited itself to saying that it would not, "comment on legal matters of the EU" and referred all enquiries to the EU.

The EU itself also declined to release more information about its investigations. A spokesman for the Competition Commissioner explained that "in the interest of investigation and to protect confidentiality we cannot give any more information".