Part of Mrs. Gardner's discount no doubt could be attributed to the fact that she was a volume buyer of Zorn etchings.
Just as Wal-Mart's customers benefit from the volume discounts secured by the world's largest retailer, so did Blockbuster's movie-fan customers gain from the lower prices for movie rentals that this volume buyer could command.
As a volume buyer of components, it can also insure consistency with its software platform, something the software only operating systems like Android (and also Windows Phone) have a much more difficult time doing.
As Harvey points out, "If you want a large check, from a volume buyer, who can put your product in front of massive customers, you have got to sell it in bricks and mortar".
The agency asked manufacturers in 1998 to create cheaper models and then helped find large-volume buyers, like universities and utilities, to buy them.
Another is that retailers would set prices on a sliding scale, to favor students or high-volume buyers -- a departure for an industry that has basically sold one product, in one configuration, discounted at periodic intervals, for decades.
Between the 1980s and today, the market for such custom integrated circuits has soared from virtually nothing to more than $15 billion, with the number of customers growing from a handful of high-volume buyers to hundreds of thousands of companies with very diverse end-user applications.
Today's ECJ ruling could mean dominant companies feel they have more flexibility in offering rebates to high-volume buyers, suggested Komninos — adding that it could ultimately lead to cheaper priced products for consumers.
Yet only last year Europe's top court ruled that the case against Intel — which focused on it offering rebates to high-volume buyers — should be sent back to a lower court to be re-examined, nearly a decade after the original antitrust decision.
