The Commission has opened a formal investigation against Qualcomm Inc., a US-based chipset manufacturer, for abuse of dominance following a complaint by Ericsson, Nokia, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, NEC and Panasonic. Qualcomm holds intellectual property rights for CDMA and WCDMA standards, which are incorporated in the UMTS standard for mobile phone technology. The complainants allege that Qualcomm’s licensing practices are unfair, unreasonable and discriminatory and therefore violate EC competition rules.