The US Department of Justice has charged that Samsung, along with three other companies, conspired to set prices of DRAM between 1999 and 2002. The four companies, the Department of Justice has said, violated US antitrust law by sharing information in an effort to set uniform prices for the DRAM modules they sold to companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, the world`s two largest PC and server makers. The Department of Justice alleges that the price fixing occurred between April 1999 and June 2002, a time period which battered the DRAM makers. PCs are the largest consumers of DRAM, which they use as their main memory. But the PC market, which had been expanding through the 1990s and in most of 2000, contracted during late 2000 throughout 2001, deflating demand for DRAM. Such a turn of events normally causes DRAM manufacturers to cut prices in order to compete and maintain their market share. ”