The European Commission cleared the joint venture and five related agreements between Fujitsu Ltd and Advanced Micro Devices Inc to create Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor for the fabrication of Flash memory chips: it said that although it had found the joint venture restricted competition in the market, the effects of this were outweighed by the fact that the dissemination of the products would lead to technical and economic progress by making possible the production of increasingly smaller, faster and more reliable electronic system products ranging from computers to portable telephones and voice mail – although why a Japanese and an American company should have to waste time and money trying to explain such arcana to the European Commission is difficult to comprehend.
