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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

They had 1.65B net income in last year, and they have to pay 0.06B every year for five years, so it's around 4% of their net income. It's not business ending or severe but it isn't exactly cheap.

Also as the article notes, future years may not be as rosy and it will not be fun having a fixed cost hanging over their head.

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More precisely the percentage was 3.6, which is not great, but not terrible. I've been told it's the equivalent of a few pay raises.

Indeed, and it's a fine line between "the cost of doing business" and ruining a large company over the decisions by a few people. Would probably have been better to go after the people at the top than fining the company..

American justice is about extracting money from a corporate entity not personal accountability.

As long as money flows freely, the show must go on

No, the concept of having corporations is 100% about this since their creation. If you look into the history of corporations it's kind of the point. Not more 'you and your family will be completely ruined and destroyed' but instead 'you can lose your business' sparked a revolutionary change in business the enabled the modern world and allowed people to undertake huge products that no sane person would take a risk on if they assumed responsibility for.

All of that is financial.

Criminal violations are not supposed to be protected by the corporate veil.

And if management committed crimes they are punished. I even spent multiple years in the feds with some of those guys.

> Criminal violations are not supposed to be protected by the corporate veil.

And they aren't, at least in the US. Just look at Martin Shkreli actually serving 5 years in prison for securities fraud and personally repaying ~$70mil.

P.S. none of this is related to the Daraprim controversy btw. Thought to mention because I have been seeing that misconception quite a bit online.

Correct! Now, only if we behaved like that was true.

Except people get arrested for sanction busting somewhat frequently..

It's possible that the fine was already factored in the sale price. According to that other comment, Huawei had really no other choice that to buy them from an American company.

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but 4% of annual income for a nonviolent, political-games type of violation seems quite high to me. Especially considering this was only one sale, and only one product, not their entire income that was involved in the violation.

The whole point of the fine is punishment. Seagate will have a stronger financial motive to comply with the law. If it's cheaper to risk getting caught and paying a small fine, there's much less incentive not to break the law.

Indeed, this one will sting for Seagate. That's like a $10B fine for Apple.

I don't know what point you are trying to make with that $10b fine for Apple comparison. We know the number and the % of their income. That's enough without meaningless comparisons.

> That's enough without meaningless comparisons.

The comparison is far from meaningless. If penalties have no sting, they have no deterrent value. Did you object the particular mega-company comp? If so, pleas feel free to insert your own.

$10B is a lot of money, no doubt, but it only represents about a fifth of what Apple currently has in cash. How much cash does Seagate have? Probably none. So it would be more like a $60B fine for Apple.

> How much cash does Seagate have? Probably none

You know all public companies disclose this quarterly right? You could just look it up instead of giving an incorrect answer. They have $766m on hand. This is less than half of what seagate has on hand.

> They have $766m on hand.

Seagate has $766M in cash.

> This is less than half of what seagate has on hand.

What!?

Subtracting debt, Apple now has $54B in cash.[1] Subtracting a debt of $6.03B Seagate has minus $5.264B.[2]

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/02/apple-1q-2023-earnings/

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/stx:us:debt

300M is less than half of 766M.

Thanks, I just didn't see it. But then by this measure, since Apple has $165B in cash pre-debt, one would have to fine Apple roughly $64B, or about five Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, for the metaphor to be apt, not $10B.

They gave you a chatGPT number: incorrect with confidence

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