South Korea's antitrust regulator said Wednesday it is investigating Samsung Electronics Co. for allegedly selling NAND-type flash memory chips to Apple Computer Inc. of the United States at below-market prices.

The investigation came less than two months after South Korean ruling Uri Party lawmaker Kim Hyun-mi raised the allegation at a parliamentary audit by the Fair Trade Commission.

"We are now checking whether the allegation is true after receiving related documents from Samsung," Lee Seok-joon, a senior official of the commission's fair competition division, was quoted by South Korean Yonhap News Agency as saying.

However, Lee declined to comment further since the probe is underway.

Samsung, the world's No. 1 maker of flash memory chips, has been under pressure from South Korean MP3 player manufacturers amid allegations that it sold flash memory chips, used in digital music players for data storage, to Apple at a substantial discount.

Meanwhile, in September, US-based market researcher iSuppli Corp. said Apple's introduction of the iPod nano music player, the first to use flash memory chips for data storage, was helped by Samsung's substantial price cut for those chips.

Source: Xinhua