Royal Philips Electronics NV and five other electronics-makers were sued by a customer for allegedly conspiring to inflate the prices of glass-tube displays found in some computer monitors and televisions. The complaint, filed today in federal court in San Francisco, claims Philips was joined in the alleged price-fixing cartel by LG Electronics Inc., Tatung Co.'s Chunghwa Picture Tubes unit, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Samsung Electronics Co. and Toshiba Corp. The plaintiff seeks class status to represent all customers affected by the alleged price fixing.

The companies created the cartel to offset a drop in demand for so-called cathode-ray tubes caused by the advent of more advanced liquid-crystal and plasma-display technology, according to the suit. The cost of cathode-ray tubes should have fallen with demand, plaintiff's lawyer Joseph Saveri said today in a statement distributed by Business Wire. "Instead, for almost a decade, we have seen periods of unnatural and sustained price stability, as well as inexplicable increases in the prices of CRTs," Saveri, of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco, said in the statement.

The suit was filed on behalf of businesses and individuals who have purchased products with cathode-ray tubes since 1998. Several of the defendants have been the subject of coordinated enforcement actions by the U.S. Justice Department and antitrust authorities in Europe, Japan and South Korea over the prices of cathode-ray tubes.

Learn more about the CRT antitrust litigation.