In its 61-page complaint, Dell said it filed suit "on behalf of itself and its affiliates to recover for antitrust and other harms arising from billions of dollars of purchases at artificially inflated prices, over several years, of thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display panels, or products containing TFT-LCD panels."

Dell alleges the companies formed a cartel to artificially inflate the prices on components Dell has been purchasing from them since 1996. Dell claims it has suffered, but didn't specify damages.

None of the companies named in the suit has issued an official comment. However, some of the brands have been down this road before. Sharp agreed to pay a $120 million fine for price-fixing in April 2001 and December 2006, the Dell lawsuit says. Hitachi also agreed to pay $31 million for the same offense.

Dell's Business Sense

Considering that Dell purchased billions of dollars worth of LCD screens over the past five years as LCDs became the display of choice for most desktop and virtually all laptop computers, it makes sense for the company to attempt to recover the money it thinks it was overcharged, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT .

Since the U.S. government has already pursued and received fines from two of the companies, King isn't surprised that Dell is pursuing legal action -- and he said other vendors could soon line up to recover the financial damages they claim to have suffered at the hands of the cartel.

"If you look at past suits where an admission of guilt has resulted in injuries to third parties, it does create a dynamic that leads to additional suits," King said. "It's not like Sharp and Hitachi can go to a judge and claim the Dell allegations have no validity. They've already admitted that they participated in this kind of behavior. The real question is not one of guilt. It's a question of how much are the appropriate damages to pay."

A Price to Pay

Given the sheer size of the financial relationship between Dell and the five Asian companies, King said it likely took Dell time to nail down the total number of screens it purchased from each vendor and determine overcharges.

"Given the nature of the LCD business, you've got prices changing with almost every contract and also according to whatever marketplace demand is," King said. "So it's not like it was a single figure that could be applied to all of the contracts or all of the individual screens. I imagine they probably wore out a calculator doing the math."

At the end of the day, King said the few extra dollars of profit from an appropriately priced LCD screen multiplied over tens of thousands of PCs and laptops could have been significant for Dell. And the ramifications of this suit extend beyond Dell to other vendors. King expects the Dell suit to provide some entertaining discussions for the next few months.